You May Not Reap What You Sow: How Employees' Moral Awareness Minimizes Ethical Leadership's Positive Impact on Workplace Deviance

Although a growing body of research has shown the positive impact of ethical leadership on workplace deviance, questions remain as to whether its benefits are consistent across all situations. In this investigation, we explore an important boundary condition of ethical leadership by exploring how em...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of business ethics 2017-12, Vol.146 (2), p.257-277
Main Authors: Gok, Kubilay, Sumanth, John J., Bommer, William H., Demirtas, Ozgur, Arslan, Aykut, Eberhard, Jared, Ozdemir, Ali Ihsan, Yigit, Ahmet
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Business and Management
Business Ethics
Chief executive officers
Citizenship education
Contingencies
Deviance
Education
Employee behavior
Employees
Ethics
Generalizability
Leadership
Management
Morality
Original Paper
Philosophy
Quality of Life Research
THEMATIC SYMPOSIUM ARTICLES
Workplaces
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Summary:Although a growing body of research has shown the positive impact of ethical leadership on workplace deviance, questions remain as to whether its benefits are consistent across all situations. In this investigation, we explore an important boundary condition of ethical leadership by exploring how employees' moral awareness may lessen the need for ethical leadership. Drawing on substitutes for leadership theory, we suggest that when individuals already possess a heightened level of moral awareness, ethical leadership's role in reducing deviant actions may be reduced. However, when individuals lack this strong moral disposition, ethical leadership may be instrumental in inspiring them to reduce their deviant actions. To enhance the external validity and generalizability of our findings, the current research used two large field samples of working professionals in both Turkey and the USA. Results suggest that ethical leadership's positive influence on workplace deviance is dependent upon the individual's moral awareness—helpful for those employees whose moral awareness is low, but not high. Thus, our investigation helps to build theory around the contingencies of ethical leadership and the specific audience for whom it may be more (or less) influential.
ISSN:0167-4544
1573-0697
DOI:10.1007/s10551-017-3655-7