Innovation meets destruction: how leadership 4.0 and destructive leadership interact with participative safety to influence job satisfaction

Purpose This study examines how aggregated team perceptions of Leadership 4.0 (L4.0) and destructive leadership (DL) are associated with individual job satisfaction and whether team-level participative safety moderates these relationships. While L4.0 has been introduced as a resource-oriented response to the challenges of digital and hybrid work, empirical evidence concerning its role at the team level remains limited. Design/methodology/approach A longitudinal multilevel design was applied using data from 78 German-speaking teams (N = 253) collected across five measurement waves. L4.0, DL, and participative safety were aggregated and modeled as team-level predictors, whereas job satisfaction was modeled as an individual-level outcome. The hypotheses were tested using linear mixed models. Findings Aggregated team perceptions of L4.0 were positively associated with individual job satisfaction, whereas aggregated team perceptions of DL were negatively associated with job satisfaction. Participative safety neither showed a significant direct association with job satisfaction nor moderated the L4.0–job satisfaction relationship. However, it strengthened the negative association between DL and job satisfaction. Originality/value This study provides initial multilevel evidence that aggregated team perceptions of L4.0 are positively associated with individual job satisfaction. By examining L4.0 and DL jointly within a single analytical framework, it offers a more differentiated under-standing of how constructive and destructive leadership tendencies relate to employee well-being. Moreover, it highlights the contingent role of participative safety, which may intensify the negative association between DL and job satisfaction rather than function as a uniformly protective team resource.