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This study aims to theoretically discuss and empirically test the mediating mechanism of psychological distress and the moderating effects of Islamic work ethics (IWE) in the relationship between despotic leadership and adaptive performance.

A three-wave survey was used to gather the data from middle managers and their supervisors of construction firms in Pakistan. The final sample consisted of 304 respondents and data analysis was performed through SEM analysis.

Despotic leadership enhances employees’ psychological distress which results in a negative impact on adaptive performance. In addition, IWE played a buffering role in mitigating the harmful impacts of despotic leadership on adaptive performance.

The study is among the pioneers that have investigated how despotic leadership impacts employees’ adaptive performance via the underlying mechanism of psychological distress through the conservation of resources and social exchange theory lens.

Drawing upon conservation of theory, this study aims to extend the scant literature on the effect of leader-member exchange (LMX) on workplace deviance behaviour (WDB) and adaptive performance by investigating the role of Islamic work ethics as moderators.

A time-lagged and multi-source data of (269 paired responses) of employees working in Islamic banks were used for hypotheses testing.

Taken together, the findings revealed that Leader Member Exchange (LMX) has a positive and significant impact on adaptive performance and is negatively related to employees’ WDB. The results of the moderation effect showed the positive relationship of LMX with adaptive performance and the negative relationship with WDB is stronger for high Islamic work ethics (IWE).

This study provides practical insight that Islamic business ethics plays a significant role in fostering adaptive performance and reducing the deviance behaviour of employees.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that examined the moderating role of IWE between LMX-adaptive performance and LMX-WDB. This study has also filled the gap of scant literature about the impact of LMX on adaptive performance and WDB.

Based on the conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study seeks to investigate how job embeddedness (JE) and job frustration (JF) as serial mediators linking abusive supervision (AS) to project performance (PP) in the construction industry.

Data were gathered from 297 respondents working in six organizations involved in large-scale construction projects. The respondents were project managers, field engineers, consultants and civil engineers. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used for data analysis and hypothesis testing.

The study findings indicate that JE and JF mediate AS’s impact on PP. The findings further reveal that JE and JF serially mediated the linkage between AS and PP.

This manuscript contributes to the relevant knowledge by investigating the overlooked psychological mechanisms of JE and JF between the linkage of AS to PP. The results of this study hold significant implications for both theoretical research and management practices.