When the Boss Is Always Right: Dark Leadership, Gender Similarity, and Team Voice in Sustainability-Related Behaviors

Leadership profoundly shapes team communication and sustainability engagement. Drawing on Upper Echelons Theory (UET), this study examines how leaders' dark personality traits, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, influence team sustainability-related behaviors through promotive and prohibitive voice and how leader–team gender similarity conditions these relationships. Using multisource data from 76 team leaders and 228 team members across organizations in Peru, we find that leaders' dark traits suppress both forms of team voice, which in turn fully mediate their negative relationship with sustainability-related behaviors. Furthermore, gender similarity between leaders and team members strengthens these suppressive effects, intensifying the reduction of voice under dark leadership. By identifying employee voice as a key communicative mechanism linking leaders' dispositional traits to sustainability engagement, this study extends UET to everyday team processes and highlights how demographic alignment can amplify the influence of destructive leadership in hierarchical contexts.