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How Does Ethical Leadership Trickle Down? Test of an Integrative Dual-Process Model

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Abstract

Although the trickle-down effect of ethical leadership has been documented in the literature, its underlying mechanism still remains largely unclear. To address this gap, we develop a cross-level dual-process model to explain how the effect occurs. Drawing on social learning theory, we hypothesize that the ethical leadership of high-level managers could cascade to middle-level supervisors via its impact on middle-level supervisors’ two ethical expectations. Using a sample of 69 middle-level supervisors and 381 subordinates across 69 sub-branches from a large banking firm in China, we found that middle-level supervisors’ ethical efficacy expectation and unethical behavior–punishment expectation (as one form of ethical outcome expectations) accounted for the trickle-down effect. The explanatory role of middle-level supervisors’ ethical behavior–reward expectation (as the other form of ethical outcome expectations), however, was not supported. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. Consistent with the common practices in the management field (e.g., Mitchell and Palmer 2010; Treviño et al. 2006), we used the terms ethical and moral interchangeably in this paper.

  2. The MPQ (copyright 2010 by Sean T. Hannah and Bruce J. Avolio) was used with the permission of Mind Garden, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number 71302129).

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Correspondence to Yukun Liu.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institutional Research Committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in this study.

Appendix

Appendix

Items from the six-item ELS

  1. (1)

    Disciplines employees who violate ethical standards;

  2. (2)

    Conducts his/her personal life in an ethical manner;

  3. (3)

    Discusses business ethics or values with employees;

  4. (4)

    Sets an example of how to do things the right way in terms of ethics;

  5. (5)

    Defines success not just by results but also the way that they are obtained;

  6. (6)

    When making decisions, asks “what is the right thing to do.”

Note The above six-item ELS was from Detert et al. (2007) and was adapted based on the original 10-item ELS developed by Brown et al. (2005).

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Wang, Z., Xu, H. & Liu, Y. How Does Ethical Leadership Trickle Down? Test of an Integrative Dual-Process Model. J Bus Ethics 153, 691–705 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3361-x

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