Forecasting authoritarian drift: Climate-based early warning signals of escalating leader control

Research on destructive leadership has largely treated authoritarian leadership as a stable individual difference, rooted in personality traits. We argue instead that authoritarian leadership may take shape over time as leader respond to organizational climates that alter the perceived legitimacy of control. We use a 4-year longitudinal panel from an Eastern European service organization, and we forecast shifts in authoritarian behavior using weighted dynamic feature selection and lagged regression models. Results reveal that deteriorating justice climate and rising perceptions of organizational politics consistently predict future increases in leader control, whereas dark traits such as narcissism and Machiavellianism, while theoretically relevant, exhibit weak standalone predictive power. Crucially, narcissism predicts control escalation only under conditions of low voice climate, suggesting a conditional activation effect. By modeling authoritarian drift as a gradual, climate-contingent pattern rather than a static trait profile, this study challenges trait-dominant perspectives and reframes despotism as an emergent response to climate erosion. The findings offer a time-sensitive diagnostic framework for anticipating leadership derailment and inform HR practices aimed at preventing control intensification before it institutionalizes.