Leader Goal Orientation and Ethical Leadership: A Socio-Cognitive Approach of the Impact of Leader Goal-Oriented Behavior on Employee Unethical Behavior

Ethical leadership is an important construct in the literature on behavioral ethics in organizations, given its link with employee attitudes and behaviors. What remains unclear, however, is what leader characteristics are associated directly with ethical leader perceptions and indirectly with employ...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of business ethics 2021-09, Vol.172 (3), p.545-561
Main Authors: Marquardt, Dennis J., Casper, Wendy J., Kuenzi, Maribeth
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavior
Business and Management
Business Ethics
Cognition
Cues
Education
Employee attitude
Employee behavior
Employees
Ethical conduct
Ethics
Job performance
Leadership
Management
Misconduct
Objectives
Original Paper
Perceptions
Philosophy
Quality of Life Research
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Summary:Ethical leadership is an important construct in the literature on behavioral ethics in organizations, given its link with employee attitudes and behaviors. What remains unclear, however, is what leader characteristics are associated directly with ethical leader perceptions and indirectly with employee unethical behavior. In this paper, we use a socio-cognitive lens to integrate goal orientation theory with the literature on ethical behavior in organizations. Specifically, we propose that certain patterns of managers’ goal-oriented behavior provide signals and cues to employees about their managers’ ethical leadership, which then relates to employee displays of more unethical behavior. Using a sample of 265 manager–employee dyads, our findings largely support our claims. We found that leader performance-avoid goal orientation was negatively related to perceptions of ethical leadership and positively related to employee unethical behavior. Moderated mediation tests indicated that the positive indirect effect of leader performance-avoid goal orientation on employee unethical behavior through perceptions of ethical leadership was attenuated by higher levels of leader learning goal orientation. Taken together, these findings suggest that when leaders emphasize avoiding failure while downplaying the importance of personal learning and development, employees perceive them as less ethical and are more willing to engage in ethical misconduct. We discuss implications of our findings for both theory and practice.
ISSN:0167-4544
1573-0697
DOI:10.1007/s10551-020-04524-2