Perceived Ethical Leadership and Follower Outcomes in the Public Sector: The Moderating Effect of Followers' Need for Autonomy

• Published in: Public performance & management review 2024-07, Vol.47 (4), p.986-1013
• Main Authors: Aunin, Jellena, Lüde, Paula, Sander, Ida, Vogel, Rick, Wiesner, Julia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: ethical leadership; job satisfaction; need for autonomy; organizational commitment
• ISSN: 1530-9576; 1557-9271
• DOI: 10.1080/15309576.2024.2359570

Ethical leadership is of growing interest and concern in public administration research and practice. Although both scholarship and practical wisdom suggest that the outcomes of leadership are contingent on followers' characteristics, knowledge about what individual preferences matter for the leadership-outcome relationship and how they moderate it is still scant. This study expands on extant scholarship by focusing on the moderating role of followers' need for autonomy in the association between perceived ethical leadership and two important follower outcomes, i.e., job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. Building on self-determination theory, we test rivaling hypotheses on the moderating effect of follower's need for autonomy in a sample of public sector employees in Germany (n = 462). The results support the enhancement hypothesis, according to which the association between ethical leadership and follower outcomes increases at higher levels of need for autonomy. However, we find this effect only for job satisfaction, while no such moderation occurs in the case of affective organizational commitment. Future research is challenged to further explore the multiple contingencies of ethical leadership in the public sector by examining other configurations of outcomes and moderators at various levels of analysis.