Does team psychological capital moderate the relationship between authentic leadership and negative outcomes: an investigation in the hospitality industry

Abstract The recent theoretical advances in positive organisational variables like authentic leadership and collective psychological capital (PsyCap) provide the credo to test the possible moderating effect of collective psychological capital in the form of team PsyCap. The purpose of this study is to test a model linking authentic leadership with employee cynicism, tolerance to workplace incivility and job search behaviour at the group level. A sample of 331 employees (45 teams) from the hospitality industry in the Arab Middle Eastern context was utilised (Jordan). The findings indicated that authentic leadership was significantly related to the aforementioned variables; and team psychological capital moderated the relationship between authentic leadership and tolerance to workplace incivility. Implications for practice and theory are discussed.


Introduction
The importance of authentic approaches to leadership has recently emerged in both the research and practice literature (Avolio, Gardner, Walumbwa, Luthans, & May, 2004;Gardner, Avolio, Luthans, May, & Walumbwa, 2005;Laschinger, Borgogni, Consiglio, & Read, 2015;Leroy, Anseel, Gardner, & Sels, 2015;Walumbwa, Luthans, Avey, & Oke, 2011). The relevance and interest devoted to leadership, both by academics (Hiller, DeChurch, Murase, & Doty, 2011) and by practitioners (Bennis, 2007;George, 2003) seems to be undeniable. However, due to an apparent degradation in the quality of the overall moral fabric of contemporary leadership (Avolio & Mhatre, 2011) a new kind of leadership is required that puts values and authenticity at its core (George, 2003); and with a refocus on a positive approach towards psychological resources, authentic leadership has emerged as a positive leadership style to address these issues (Avolio & Mhatre, 2011 to 'a pattern of leader behaviour that draws upon and promotes both positive psychological capacities and a positive ethical climate, to foster greater self-awareness, an internalised moral perspective, balanced processing of information, and relational transparency on the part of leaders working with followers, fostering positive self-development' (Clapp Smith, Vogelgesang, & Avey, 2009;Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, & Peterson, 2008, p. 94). The recent competitive world is marked with frequent and continuous technological, economic, socio-political, and innovative advancements, placing an ever-greater demand on leaders to exhibit a pattern of openness and clarity in their behaviours toward others.
Academicians and practitioners agree that for the hospitality industry, human resource is undoubtedly one of the most important assets (e.g., Chan & Wan, 2012). However, continuous pressure from hotel management as well as customers to provide a unique and quality service, long working hours, and low pay are dominant causes of stress leading to undesirable behaviours such as cynicism, workplace incivility and job search behaviour. We propose that authentic leadership can play an effective role in this regard. With an increasing trend in unemployment rates, increased volume of tasks to be accomplished, and lack of motivation, employees may become disengaged and subsequently may engage in negative behaviours (Zhu, Avolio, Riggio, & Sosik, 2011). In order to keep employees away from negative behaviours such as workplace deviance, emotional exhaustion, burnout, and ill-health, George (2007) argue that authentic leadership might be the most effective leadership style to address these issues and ensure a workplace culture where employees do not engage in counter-productive work behaviours. He suggests that the effects of authentic leadership on some of the employees' outcomes such as well-being, job satisfaction, work happiness, and organisational commitment, have been empirically tested and verified, but there is still a lot to be done in extending this body of knowledge to include other outcomes such as employee burnout and emotional exhaustion.
Psychological capital (PsyCap) is another positive organisational behaviour construct and is an emerging area of research. Luthans, Youssef, and Avolio (2007) propose that PsyCap requires a transformed organisational ideology that views employees through a positive lens as confident, hopeful, optimistic and resilient. This makes PsyCap an interesting construct to explore. Since organisations nowadays primarily have team-based functions, the call for research is in line with the way organisations currently mobilise (Glassop, 2002). The combination of positive organisational behaviour and positive leadership would seem to be a potential source to decrease the effects of negative outcomes such as cynicism, tolerance to workplace incivility, and job search behaviour.
The current study answers the call by Dawkins, Martin, Scott, and Sanderson (2015) for more empirical research on alternative forms of collective PsyCap. It attempts to establish the validity for the first time in a Middle Eastern context of a proposed alternative conceptualisation of collective PsyCap, called 'team PsyCap' and authentic leadership as well. Moreover, the study is conducted in the hotel sector which is extremely delicate to changes in political and business circumstances and in turn the performance of hotels might be influenced by this sector's evolution (Chen, 2010). Given the current remarkable dynamics in the Middle East region, the context of the hospitality sector in Jordan seems to be a relevant setting to examine our hypotheses.

Theoretical framework
Most studies involving positive leadership examine transformational, ethical, charismatic, and altruistic leadership. A particularly appealing form of positive leadership with a documented performance impact, and as yet unexplored potential is authentic leadership.
Empirical research on PsyCap has discovered a great variety of positive impacts on performance and the well-being of people in organisations. Avey, Patera, and West (2006) found PsyCap to be a predictor of both voluntary and involuntary absenteeism. Avey, Luthans, and Jensen (2009) also showed that PsyCap is a key to better understanding the variation in perceived symptoms of stress, as well as intentions to quit and job search behaviours. The present study is grounded on social contagion theory. Theoretically, social contagion theory can contribute to the emergence of PsyCap as a higher-level construct due to its social nature. Social contagion has received increased research attention and has even been applied in various disciplines and various situations (Dawkins et al., 2015;Levy & Nail, 1993;Luthans, Norman, & Hughes, 2006;Pastor & Mayo, 1994). Social contagion can be defined as the process of communication and the exchange of information among members, and a spreading influence from one individual to another. More subtly, individuals may influence each other's beliefs and attitudes.
In order to lower the incidents of uncivil behaviour, organisations may need a leader who values employees, provides a good working environment, treats them with justice and fairness, and ensures self-development; all of these traits are theoretically relevant to authentic leadership. The referent-shift approach is utilised to measure 'team PsyCap' in this study, according to which, an individual with high individual-level PsyCap could have high or low team-level PsyCap. Even though the approach utilises individual-level responses of the team members, the responses are with reference to team aspects and as a consequence the approach links team level theory and measurement.

Authentic leadership and employees' negative outcomes
Based on social contagion theory, when employees perceive the leader as being hopeful, resilient, genuine, reliable, ethical and consistent over time, a contagion effect occurs, diminishing the tendency of negative attitudes and behaviours (Luthans et al., 2006;Avolio et al., 2004). This perception puts the leaders in a position to stimulate (contagion effect) shared values among other employees. Ultimately, employees feel motivated to display positive behaviours, and have a sense of self-worth and also feel obligated to reciprocate (Ilies, Morgeson, & Nahrgang, 2005).
Employee cynicism is an important research area because cynicism can 'undermine leaders, institutions and practices they support' (Andersson & Bateman, 1997). Employee cynicism results from disagreement with organisational expectations, lack of social support and recognition, lack of participation in decision-making and also lack of communication. Cynicism becomes a problem when employees think that others' decisions or actions affect their own self-interests and are not aligned with their own goals and objectives (Stanley, Meyer, & Topolnytsky, 2005). Afsar, Badir, and Bin Saeed (2014) extend the discussion by highlighting the fact that the inability of leaders due to laziness or insincerity to make effective decisions that match the value system of individuals would also ignite cynical attitudes.
In a study on contract workers in the hospitality industry, Faulkner and Patiar (1997) identified work overload, undervaluation, and a lack of managerial consultation and communication as sources of stress that results in cynicism. Zapf, Seifert, Schmutte, Mertini, and Holz (2001) in a study on hotels showed that high levels of organisational stressors might result in emotional exhaustion and cynicism. Peus, Wesche, Streicher, Braun, and Frey (2012) added that negative leader behaviours (hiding information, not taking responsibility and deceiving others) can cause an increase in follower's cynicism. Laschinger and Fida (2014) found that authentic supervisors decrease employees' emotional exhaustion. Authentic leaders ensure that employees have sufficient resources to accomplish their work, hence, emotional exhaustion and inevitable outcomes such as cynicism, are less likely. Since the leader is an important part of an employees' social environment, s/he can influence the employee's cynicism. Therein, authentic leaders can reduce employees' cynicism by sharing genuine positive feelings about the organisation. Drawing from this theoretical, empirical, and practical literature, we derive the following hypothesis: H1a: Authentic leadership is negatively related to employee cynicism.
In a similar vein, workplace incivility is very common (Cortina, Magley, Williams, & Langhout, 2001) and can adversely affect organisations and psychological and the physical well-being of employees (Abubakar, Namin, İbrahim, Arasli, & Tunç, 2017;Pearson & Porath, 2009). In the present study, we deal with incivility from a tolerating point of view rather than who is the instigator or the victim, as there is a dearth of studies investigating this form of incivility in the workplace (Loi, Loh, & Hine, 2015). Management tolerance to incivility in the workplace is shown to be related to a number of affective, attitudinal, cognitive and behavioural outcomes. For example, it results in decreased organisational commitment and motivation, lower levels of perceived fairness (Lim & Lee, 2011), work withdrawal (Pearson & Porath, 2009), intention to sabotage (Abubakar, Yazdian, & Behravesh, 2018) and turnover intentions (Griffin, 2010). Cortina (2008, p. 62) pointed out that 'leaders set the tone for the entire organisation, and employees look to them for cues about what constitutes acceptable conduct' . Based on this, we argue that authentic leadership is an important situational factor that can affect workplace tolerance to incivility. Leader's/manager's tolerance of incivility is considered a type of organisational climate (Loi et al., 2015). This study proposes that when employees have an authentic leader, they might perceive their workplace to be less tolerant to uncivil behaviour. Managers need to set clear norms about acceptable behaviours. They also need to reinforce the importance of not deterring from the norms by correcting deviations or punishing offenders (e.g., Porath & Pearson, 2013).
In order to deter employees from workplace incivility, it is important that leaders should take the initiative and clearly state that rude and uncivil behaviour is unacceptable and will not be tolerated, and simultaneously, reinforce the consequences of uncivil behaviour (Pearson & Porath, 2004). If this is not done, then employees may perceive such behaviour as acceptable. This is how the leader is able to influence employees' workplace behaviour (Loi et al., 2015). Therefore, an authentic leader may intervene in the workplace by punishing and rectifying incivility. In most cases, authentic leaders communicate expectations of interpersonal treatment related behaviour, normatively. Robinson and O'Leary-Kelly (1998) also found that employees were more likely to engage in bad behaviour (e.g., anti-social behaviour, theft) if they felt they would not be punished for it. Thus, authentic leadership and tolerance incivility are expected to have a negative relation. Drawing from this theoretical, empirical, and practical literature, we derive the following hypothesis: H1b: Authentic leadership is negatively related to tolerance to workplace incivility.
Job search behaviour is important because it can predict voluntary turnover (Blau, 1994). Job search behaviour can induce withdrawal behaviour and reduce commitment to the organisation. Apart from this the organisation also faces the costs of time and energy spent on job search as compared to work activities. Barber, Daly, Giannantonio, and Phillips (1994) define job search behaviour as the identification of existing job opportunities and gathering of more information on the job alternatives that are selected. The job search behaviour is terminated either when the employment goal is accomplished or if the behaviour is abandoned (Kanfer, Wanberg, & Kantrowitz, 2001). The premise of this approach is self-regulation, which refers to the ways in which people control and direct their actions (Bandura, 1989). Hughes et al. (2010) posit that followers are less inclined to leave a job when they share personal and social identity with a leader. Campion, Mumford, Morgeson, and Nahrgang (2005) showed that the positive climate created by the leader makes employees feel secure and confident, and consequently increases the feeling of belongingness to the work. Usually employees search for other jobs and intend to quit the organisation when they face disempowering working conditions and feel that the opportunities to grow professionally are minimal (Singh, Goolsby, & Rhoads, 1994). The followers of authentic leaders feel safer and become loyal to the organisation (Mulki, Jaramillo, & Locander, 2006). Authentic leaders create structures that facilitate follower autonomy, and acknowledge followers' perspectives and interests (Ilies et al., 2005). They also promote positive organisational behaviours which in turn promote positive organisational outcomes and reduce the impact of negative workplace incidents (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994). Therefore, we expect that authentic leadership would be negatively related with job search behaviour. Drawing from this theoretical, empirical, and practical literature, we derive the following hypothesis: H1c: Authentic leadership is negatively related to job search behaviour.

The processes and mechanism of team psychological capital as a moderator between authentic leadership and employees' negative outcomes 2.2.2.1. Psychological Capital (PsyCap) and Collective/team PsyCap.
PsyCap is a higher order construct, as supported conceptually (Luthans, Avolio, Avey, & Norman, 2007) and empirically (Avey, Reichard, Luthans, & Mhatre, 2011). It includes the dimensions of hope, resilience, self-efficacy and optimism. PsyCap has largely been studied as an individual level construct, but recently Youssef and Luthans (2011) urged scholars to address the construct at the team level. The reason is that most organisations nowadays are team based and there is interdependency between team members exposing them to 'emotional contagion' . This 'contagion' leads to the development of team PsyCap. This gap has drawn research attention to the emerging construct of collective PsyCap and its relationship to important outcomes.
The employee's social context is provided by the team members' interactions. On this basis, the social contagion theory contributes to the emergence of the construct of collective PsyCap (i.e., team PsyCap) (Dawkins et al., 2015). The team members share their perceptions on all the four dimensions of PsyCap. For example, goal design contributes to the hope development dimension of PsyCap, therefore when team members have goal-oriented discussions, there is an opportunity for exchange of perceptions on how the team can best achieve their goals. By engaging in these goal-oriented discussions, team members foster shared perceptions about hope and thus this facilitates the emergence of team hope. Similarly, when team members share their perceptions about goal pathways and obstacle planning, they are able to share positive expectations (optimism). Sharing this information increases the expectation that goals will be achieved (Luthans, Avey, Avolio, & Peterson, 2010), and thus shared optimism increases. Furthermore, social interactions on past performance and goal attainment perceptions of shared resilience also increase. Laschinger and Fida (2014) stated that PsyCap can play a protective role against negative consequences. Each of the four components of PsyCap is characteristic of the positive psychological resources that ultimately result in positive organisational outcomes (see Avey et al., 2011;Luthans, Youssef et al., 2007) in their meta-analysis showed that PsyCap had a significant influence on desired employee attitudes, behaviours, and performance. Previously, Luthans and Avolio (2003) also posited that positive psychological resources lead to authentic leaders' behaviours. Authentic leaders encourage employees to share their views and these ideas are used to enhance team cohesion . Afsar et al. (2014) added that when leaders ask employees for ideas, the employees gain confidence in their abilities. So, this method of exchange of information gives employees a chance to develop their collective intuition and to learn from each other (Walumbwa, Cropanzano, & Hartnell, 2009;Walumbwa et al., 2011). This in turn helps raise the collective efficacy (Jones & George, 1998), a key component of collective psychological capital (Luthans, Youssef et al., 2007). Leaders can influence the efficacy dimension of PsyCap by their ability to provide a supportive environment that could enhance employee efficacy (Thompson, Lemmon, & Walter, 2015).

The dynamics of team PsyCap and authentic leadership.
Qualitative research has shown that leaders affect employee hope by communication of performance expectations and structuring of the task environment (Thompson et al., 2015). Authentic leaders can remain realistic (Luthans & Avolio, 2003) and hopeful (i.e., agentic rational) even when faced with adversity, also they have a future orientation We propose that authentic leaders usually prefer objective information when they pass on hope to employees. So, with time as problems arise, the employee believes that these leaders are more credible sources of input and feedback. This happens due to their honest personality and their focus on the employee's involvement, strength development, and participation (Ilies et al., 2005). Therefore, these characteristics and actions of authentic leaders are vital in fostering collective hope and in turn this builds PsyCap. Similarly, optimism can be obtained by modelling (Peterson, 2000) and so authentic leaders can have an influence on employee optimism by increasing awareness and understanding of the employees about the importance of team goals and accomplishment. In this way an authentic leader can model favourite behaviour.

Team PsyCap and negative outcomes.
Most research has focused on the relationship between PsyCap and positive outcomes like job satisfaction and organisational commitment, etc. (Luthans, Norman, Avolio, & Avey, 2008;. This study expands the boundaries of research in this area by studying the relationship of PsyCap with three negative attitudes and behaviours that are relevant to today's workplaces. Scholars have shown that collective PsyCap is related to team level outcomes (e.g., Clapp Smith et al., 2009;West, Patera, & Carsten, 2009). Avey, Luthans, and Youssef (2010) found that employees with higher PsyCap are more likely to experience lower levels of cynicism. Similarly, Tokgöz and Yılmaz (2008) concluded that when the perceptions of group harmony were high, the relationship between transformational leadership and organisational cynicism was stronger.
Team PsyCap can decrease follower cynicism through stronger feeling of self-efficacy that is found to decrease perceived stress and foster active coping and positive thinking (Shen, 2009). In the same vein, a team's attributional optimism style helps followers to perceive a positive event as permanent, internal, and pervasive and a negative event as temporary, external, and situational (Min, Kim, & Lee, 2015). The collective willpower of the team to reach its goals (hope) also contributes positively to curb the negative effects of follower's frustration and cynicism . Finally, the capacity to recover from negative events (resilience) is viewed as one of the important conditions to deal with workplace cynicism (Luthans, 2002). Therefore, teams high in psychological capital are expected to be more likely meet challenge stressors confidently under authentic leaders and less likely to experience negative emotions such as cynicism; hence moderating the effect of authentic leadership on followers' cynicism.
In a constantly changing workplace environment, high team PsyCap implies that team members are better equipped to deal with the stressors, as they are flexible to changing demands, display confidence to deal with challenging situations, are optimist and think positively in negative circumstances, are open to new experiences, and show more emotional stability in conflict resolution and adverse moments (Min et al., 2015). When these positive psychological resources of a team interact with relationship-oriented authentic leadership style, the level of individual negative behaviours such as cynicism, decreases to a greater extent. Employees have found support from authentic leaders in the form of fairness, meaningfulness, honesty, relational transparency, and empowerment and when it is further integrated with positive psychological resources of a team such as optimism, hope, resiliency, and self-efficacy, the effect on cynicism gets stronger. Drawing from this theoretical, empirical, and practical literature, we derive the following hypothesis: H2a: Team PsyCap moderates the relationship between authentic leadership and employee's cynicism, such that the relationship will be strengthened when team PsyCap is high.
By extrapolating a similar line of thought on tolerance to workplace incivility, it can be argued that when individuals have an authentic leader, they have a positive attitude towards their organisation and co-workers. Roberts, Scherer, and Bowyer (2011) found that PsyCap moderated the effect that stress had on the employee's tendency to exhibit incivility, i.e., employees with high PsyCap displayed less workplace incivility. In addition, when the PsyCap of the group is high, there is a further positivity that results in lower workplace incivility. We argue that authentic leadership has a similar effect with team PsyCap in terms of the extent to which it tolerates workplace incivility by virtue of building positive psychological resources. Self-efficacious teams will tend to have more belief that they cannot tolerate negative behaviour such as incivility, as it may undermine the team members' confidence under authentic , than those teams who lack confidence in their abilities to deal with negative situations such as workplace incivility despite the fact that authentic leaders provide them with a positive work climate (Woolley, Caza, & Levy, 2011).
Moreover, resilient teams will be more likely to respond effectively to challenges, and overcome and work through any potential obstacles to disparage workplace incivility than those who do not show an inclination to put in their own efforts into dealing with uncivil behaviours and rather wait for authentic leaders and other co-workers to do it for them. These arguments are supported by Avey et al. (2009) who found that PsyCap reduced physiological and behavioural symptoms of stress. It would be reasonable, therefore, to expect that team PsyCap may also moderate the influence of stress on tolerance to incivility. Drawing from this theoretical, empirical, and practical literature, we derive the following hypothesis: H2b: Team PsyCap moderates the relationship between authentic leadership and tolerance to workplace incivility such that the relationship will be strengthened when team PsyCap is high.
In a similar manner, for job search behaviour, employees with high PsyCap would have low turnover intentions for several reasons. First, individuals with high PsyCap are optimistic about their future and believe in their ability to succeed. So, they are more likely to take charge of their fate in their current job (Seligman, 1998). Second, high optimism and resilience make high PsyCap employees select challenging jobs (Bandura, 1997) and they persevere to achieve success even when they face challenges and do not opt to quit. Apart from this, employees with high levels of resilience are more likely to adapt to the environment and also recover from negative experiences in the organisation. Hence, the intention to quit does not develop. Finally, employees with high hopes are more likely to take numerous paths to succeed in their job, this further decreases their intention to quit or search for another job.
High PsyCap means higher hope and optimism which elicit positive emotions (Loi et al., 2015) and increase the likelihood of success. When faced with challenges, people in hopeful teams show fewer negative emotions. So, positive emotions, self-awareness and meaningful purpose, and hope can help reduce job search behaviour by triggering a more optimistic cognitive affective procedure system. As a self-regulatory process, the intensity of job search behaviour can be expected to change because of high levels of positive psychological resources and leader behaviour. People working in higher team PsyCap are more likely to remain in their jobs rather than quit (Min et al., 2015). There may be cases, where looking for alternatives is the best option for an employee, but those high on hope would prefer to pursue positive outcomes rather than avoid negative outcomes. Drawing from this theoretical, empirical, and practical literature, we derive the following hypothesis: H2c: Team PsyCap moderates the relationship between authentic leadership and job search behavior such that the relationship will be strengthened when team PsyCap is high.
The earlier stated judgments and discussions led to the suggestion of the conceptual model depicted in Figure 1.

Sample and procedure
To collect data, hotel employees working in international hotels in Jordan were selected. In order to generalise the results to the whole hotel industry, we selected various hotels instead of a single hotel. Permission was requested from the managers of these hotels and respondents were informed about the purpose of research. They were also ensured confidentiality of the survey. Convenience sampling technique was employed in this study. The sample consisted of 45 intact team members consisting of 331 employees from international hotels in Jordan. The survey was developed in English and then back-translated to Arabic by two linguistic experts as suggested by Perrewe et al. (2002). A participatory pilot survey was conducted with 15 hotel employees, the result shows that the questions were fully understood by the employees.

Time 1
Five hundred questionnaires were distributed at time 1. Each employee received a survey packet containing a cover letter from the researchers requesting their participation. The cover letter explained the purpose of the study, and the approval of the hotel management. They were also provided with assurances of confidentiality to reduce the potential threat of common method bias as suggested by Padsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, and Podsakoff (2003). The employees were also informed that they would receive another short survey in approximately 2 weeks' time. At time 1, AL, team PsyCap and demographic data were collected. Only 398 valid questionnaires were returned, resulting in a 79% response rate.

Time 2
Approximately 2 weeks later, the employees who completed the time 1 (n = 398) survey were given a second questionnaire that assessed employee cynicism, tolerance to workplace incivility, job search behaviour and demographic data. A total of 344 questionnaires were returned, resulting in an 86% response rate (about 6 to 10 employees from each group completed the surveys at time 2). Assigned identification numbers enabled the researchers to match the questionnaires with each other. Only 331 responses were used for data analysis due to missing data. Response error was examined by evaluating the demographic data (gender, age, and work experience) of those who returned surveys at time 1 and those who did not respond at time 2 (Collier & Bienstock, 2007). No significant differences were detected.

Demographic variables
The average age of the participants was about 35 years, and 63% were males; 51% receive a monthly income between 400 and 599 Dinar, 33% receive more than 600 Dinar and the rest less than 400 Dinar. Over 70% of employees had at least associate degrees or higher. About 38% had been with the hotel between 4 and 6 years, 30% between 1 and 3 years, 20% for less than a year and the rest had been with the hotel for more than 6 years.

Tolerance to workplace incivility
Workplace incivility was assessed via 4 items adopted from (Hulin, Fitzgerald, & Drasgow, 1996;Loi et al., 2015;Martin & Hine, 2005) uncivil workplace behaviour study. Sample item includes, 'What would likely happen if you made a formal complaint against a co-worker who engaged in the following behaviour? For example, repeatedly treated you in overtly hostile manner (e.g., spoke to you in aggressive tone of voice, made snide remarks to you, or rolled his or her eyes at you)' .

Job search behaviour
Employee's perception about job search behaviour was measured via 10 items adopted from the Blau (1994) study. Participants were asked to indicate how much time they had spent in the last four months on several preparatory and active job search activities. Sample item includes 'made inquiries/read about getting a job' . Response choices range from 1 = no time at all to 5 = very much time. Eight items loaded cleanly (.64, .69, .61, .69, .70, .81, .60, .75); C.R. = .88; A.V.E. = .50 and α = .88.

Results
S.P.S.S. and A.M.O.S. version 20.0 were used for analyses. Several goodness of fit indices were evaluated namely; chi-square statistic (X 2 = 1941.5, d.f = 762, p <. 001), goodness-offit indices (G.F.I. = .80, values close to 1 indicate a very good fit) as suggested by (Tanaka & Huba, 1985), the normed fit index (N.F.I. = .87, values close to 1 indicate a very good fit) as suggested by (Bentler & Bonett, 1980), the comparative fit index (C.F.I. = .92, values close to 1 indicate a very good fit) as suggested by McDonald and Marsh (1990), root mean square error of approximation (R.M.S.E.A. = .068, values < .08 indicate a very good fit), and the X 2 re-estimate test (C.M.I.N./D.F. = 2.5, values > 1 and < 5 were accepted) as suggested by Wheaton, Muthén, Alwin, and Summers (1977). The goodness of fit indices for the 5-item model yielded a moderate fit, whereas one item model yielded a poor fit as presented in Table 1. Therein, the potential threat of common method bias was not a problem as suggested by (Padsakoff et al., 2003).
All measures were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis (C.F.A.) to provide support for the issues of dimensionality, convergent and discriminant validity. The retained item loadings exceeded .50; Cronbach's alphas were all above the benchmark of .70; C.R. and A.V.E. were also above the benchmark of .50 (Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, & Tatham, 2006). This does provide evidence of convergent validity among our measures. The estimated correlation between the variables is below 0.85 which does provide evidence of discriminant validity as recommended by (Kline, 2005). Means, standard deviations, and correlations of the study variables are presented in Table 2. As predicted, the relationship between authentic leadership and employee cynicism was negative and significant (r = −.12, p <. 05); tolerance to workplace incivility (r = −.19, p <. 01); and job search behaviour (r = −.20, p <. 01). Thus, this provides a preliminary support for hypotheses 1a, 1b, and 1c.
Intra-class correlations analysis (I.C.C.) with the aid of two-way mixed and absolute agreement definitions were used to assess the level of agreement between groups, that is whether groups can be differentiated These results indicate that it was appropriate to analyse our data at the group level, because it appears that the effects observed in the present study are attributable to perceptions of employees and not necessarily due to the nature of the hotel branch. The regression co-efficient shown in Table 3 indicates that the hypothesised model explicitly describes the role of the research variables in the study. As expected, authentic leadership has a negative and significant impact on employee cynicism (β = −.116, t = −2.13). Thus, this provides collateral support for hypothesis 1a. Hypothesis 2a states that team PsyCap will moderate the relationship between authentic leadership and employee cynicism, such that the negative relationship will be stronger when team PsyCap is high. The relationship is not significant (β = .034, t = .618) and is dampened by high team PsyCap, as such, hypothesis 1b was rejected.
Hypothesis 1b states that authentic leadership is negatively related to tolerance to workplace incivility, the relationship is significant (β = −.190, t = −3.51), and hypothesis 1b received empirical support. Hypothesis 2b states that team PsyCap will moderate the relationship between authentic leadership and tolerance to workplace incivility, such that the negative relationship will be stronger when team PsyCap is high. The relationship is not significant (β = .034, t = .618), but high team PsyCap strengthened the negative relationship. Relying on this, as well as the strength of the significant direct effect (team PsyCap ￫ Tolerance to workplace incivility; β = −.118, t = −2.16) demonstrated in Table 3, Hypothesis 2b received partial empirical support (see Figure 2). Hypothesis 1c states that authentic leadership is negatively related to job search behaviour, the relationship is negative and significant (β = −.204, t = −3.79). Relying on this, hypothesis 1c received empirical support. Hypothesis 2c states that team PsyCap will moderate the relationship between authentic leadership and job search behaviour, such that the negative relationship will be stronger when team PsyCap is high. The relationship is not significant (β = .034, t = .625) and is dampened by high team PsyCap, as such, hypothesis 2c was rejected.

Discussion
The current study drew on insights from multiple streams of research to test the effect of authentic leadership and team PsyCap on the following negative employee behaviours: cynicism, tolerance to workplace incivility, and job search behaviour in the hospitality industry in Jordan, an Arabic middle-eastern context. This study was motivated by a desire to understand the moderating role of team PsyCap on the relationship between authentic leadership and employee cynicism, tolerance to workplace incivility, and job search behaviours. In line with what has been suggested in previous theoretical work (Laschinger & Fida, 2014), this study found that authentic leadership explains the variance in employee cynicism, tolerance to workplace incivility, and job search behaviours among hotel employees. The results of this study suggest that team PsyCap may not be as important as expected in moderating the negative relationship between authentic leadership and employee's negative behaviours. Specifically, team PsyCap was only able to partially strengthen the negative relationship between authentic leadership and workplace incivility. However, no significant moderating effect of team PsyCap was found on the relationship between authentic leadership and cynicism as well as job search behaviour.
The findings of the study suggest that authentic leadership had a significant negative relationship with three job behaviours namely tolerance to workplace incivility, cynicism, and job search behaviour. However, team PsyCap did not significantly moderate the effect of authentic leadership on cynicism and job search behaviour. Essentially, if team PsyCap is high, the effect of authentic leadership on employee cynicism does not become more important because authentic leadership is strongly related to cognitions and behaviours at the individual level. The study found partial support for the moderating effect of team PsyCap on the relationship between authentic leadership and tolerance to workplace incivility. Based on social contagion theory, this might be due to the fact that authentic leadership influences followers' attitudes and behaviours through the key psychological processes of identification, hope, positive emotions, optimism, and trust , leading to decreased tolerance to workplace incivility. Another possible explanation might be that individual team members are influenced by the psychological states of other members (contagion effects) and hence teams may become similar in their affective states. Therefore, individuals might restrict themselves from displaying workplace uncivil behaviours under authentic leaders.

Practical implications
The current study has important practical implications. This study suggests that (a) selecting leaders with authentic features and (b) implementing training and development actions aimed at increasing authentic leadership Gardner et al., 2005;Luthans & Avolio, 2003) and team PsyCap may have a positive impact on employees' psychological resources and performance. Our findings support the notion that building authentic leadership skills among managers and strengthening hotel employee teams' psychological capital may be promising core strategies for reducing employee cynicism, tolerance to workplace incivility, and alternate job search behaviours. By promoting PsyCap's agentic thinking, employees may be motivated and that can enhance internalisation, determination, and pathways thinking, which contradict the 'giving up' and despair associated with tolerance to workplace incivility and cynicism. Though the moderating effects of team PsyCap could not be substantiated in this study, managers must understand the additional benefits of boosting PsyCap (high self-efficacy, optimism, hope and resiliency) via intervention that function in a synergistic manner.
Authentic leaders should epitomise those qualities that they seek others to emulate. Analogously, authentic leadership development involves ongoing processes whereby leaders and followers gain self-awareness and establish open, transparent, trusting, and genuine relationships, which in part may be shaped and impacted by planned interventions such as training . This study adds to the relatively few studies linking authentic leadership practices to negative behaviours of employees such as cynicism and incivility. The hotel managers exhibiting authentic characteristics and behaviours may be instrumental in dealing with their subordinates' negative behaviours in highly challenging and stressful environments. The results also add to our knowledge of how team psychological capital, may interact with authentic leadership-via contagion influences-to affect the level of cynicism and tolerance to workplace incivility of the hotel employees. These results confirm that PsyCap, which has been described as motivational propensity , can help defuse undesirable attitudinal and behavioural outcomes.
In addition to psychological capital, the findings of this study in regard to authentic leadership also have several practical implications. First, authentic leaders have been found to be very effective in reducing the level of cynicism among their subordinates and given the strength of the negative relationship between authentic leadership and employee cynicism, hotels that wish to innovate continuously, perform total quality management activities round the clock, and accelerate change may significantly benefit from developing authentic leaders within their management ranks. Hotels are always trying to create a unique customer experience for their guests, and to embrace that unique experience, they need their employees to think positively about continual change. The management should start a training programme that facilitates the development of employee resiliency by teaching participants not only to identify potential workplace setbacks (e.g., missing a project deadline), but by having participants consider the realistic impact of the setback(s) as well as options for taking action. Through education and practice, participants are equipped with a learned cognitive process that allows them to develop both resiliency and optimism about future potential setbacks. By reminding employees to think positively and encouraging employees to find meaning in negative events, employees would also start to think what can be achieved instead of what cannot be accomplished.
Given that those higher in cynicism are less likely to embrace and engage in organisational change and innovations, then the results of this study would suggest that these developed authentic leaders can help decrease the level of employee cynicism and increase the rate of positive organisational change. Furthermore, authentic leaders have also been found effective in decreasing workplace incivility. Authentic leaders understand that workplace incivility thrives in environments where input from employees is crushed and it can be detrimental to organisations and their members, even when there is no apparent intent to harm. Therefore, authentic leaders do not feel reluctant to manage messy, unpleasant events, even when those events have the potential to affect their own work environments adversely.

Limitations and future research
This study is not without limitations. First, no causal conclusions can be drawn. Specifically, neither experimental manipulation nor random assignment was part of the design of this study. Second, a notable limitation to this study is the use of a single information source. Individuals were asked to report on both the independent and dependent variables in this study. Podsakoff and colleagues (2003) noted that this common source bias can lead to inflated relationships. Thus, this study followed their recommendations to separate data collection of variables over time. This procedure can help minimise but obviously does not eliminate this limitation. Future research should also focus on experimental studies to establish the causal, directional impact of authentic leadership and negative behaviours through team PsyCap. To establish generalizability of the findings, this study should be applied in other industries as well. Future research can also look into the effect of authentic leadership on other negative behaviours such as workplace bullying, stress, and deviant behaviours. Another important suggestion is to measure the effect of other related leadership constructs such as leader-member exchange, transformational, ethical and empowering leadership to assess if authentic leadership uniquely contributes to employee cynicism, workplace incivility, and job search behaviours.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.