Abstract: Driven by drastic changes in the social environment and increasingly fierce market competition, organizations tend to pass survival pressure downward, leaving employees with heavier workloads and higher performance requirements. As a result, employees often find it difficult to strike a balance between personal health and work performance, ending up having to working while ill. Performance pressure is inherently associated with complex forms of extrinsic motivation, yet existing research has largely overlooked explanations based on extrinsic motivation within the framework of Self-determination Theory. Drawing on Self-determination Theory, this research investigates the extrinsic motivational mechanisms underlying employee presenteeism and its boundary conditions under the combined context of the goal orientation embedded in performance pressure and the threatening nature of authoritarian leadership. Using two-wave questionnaire survey data from 478 leader-employee pairing samples, the findings indicate that performance pressure significantly increases employee presenteeism, authoritarian leadership further enhances this relationship, while independent self-construals weakens the enhanced moderating effect of authoritarian leadership. By integrating organizational contexts and individual characteristics, this research extends the explanatory power of Self-determination Theory in the domain of presenteeism and provides new insights for organizational management of presenteeism.

Key words: performance pressure, presenteeism, authoritarian leadership, independent self-construals, Self-determination Theory (SDT)