Taking the perspective of dual authoritarian leadership (AL), this study adopts conservation of resources theory to probe the indirect effect of dual authoritarian leadership on athletes’ job involvement through their mental toughness. Furthermore, this study incorporates distress tolerance as a moderator to examine the boundary condition of above indirect effect. 640 surveys of first tier college baseball players from two time points were collected. The results showed that dominance-focused AL has significant indirect effect on athletes’ job involvement via mental toughness, and this negative indirect effect would weaken when athletes are high in distress tolerance, while discipline-focused AL has significant indirect effect regardless of athletes’ degree of distress tolerance. Theoretical contribution and implication meaning are discussed on the basis of the results.
