Media reports on self-serving leadership primarily focused on the negative consequences of such behavior for employees. However much remains to be understood about the antecedents of self-serving behavior of leaders. In the present research we explore the role of employees' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the emergence of self-serving leadership. Using one multi-source field study and three experiments we showed that employees' OCB towards coworkers (OCBI) negatively impacted self-serving leadership. Moreover we also examine the underlying mechanism for this relation. Results indicate that employees' OCBI mitigated leaders' hindrance stress which mediates the relationship between OCBI and self-serving leadership. As such our findings indicate that self-serving leaders are not necessarily inherently bad and that
employees have an important role in shaping leaders' self-serving behavior.