The Effects of the Leaders' Light Triad and Dark Triad on the Job Engagement of Organization Members : Focusing on the Mediating Effect of Ethical Leadership

Due to a series of corporate scandals that occurred in the early 21st century, many studies related to leadership often focused on negative characteristics such as the leaders' Dark Triad of personality.As a self-reflection of this, positive psychology looks at the positive aspects of humans, and in this context, research was conducted on the leaders' Light Triad of personality.This study examined how the Light and Dark Triad of the leader affects the member's job engagement, and the mediating effect of ethical leadership was verified to determine through what mechanism the two personality traits of the leader affect job engagement.As a result of hierarchical regression analysis, Sobel-test, and Bootstrapping, the leaders' Light Triad had a positive effect on their members' job engagement, and the leaders' Dark Triad had a negative effect on their members' job engagement.Ethical leadership fully mediated the Light Triad and job engagement and partially mediated the relationship between the Dark Triad and job engagement.These results provide theoretical implications that both aspects of light and shade must be considered simultaneously to understand human nature properly, as well as practical implications that ethical leadership must be considered important in selecting and evaluating leaders.