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Not All Followers Socially Learn from Ethical Leaders: The Roles of Followers’ Moral Identity and Leader Identification in the Ethical Leadership Process

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Abstract

Recent literature suggests that ethical leadership helps to inhibit followers’ unethical behavior, largely built on the premise that followers view ethical leaders as ethical role models and socially learn from them, thereby engaging in more (less) (un)ethical conduct. This premise, however, has not been adequately tested, leaving insufficient understanding concerning the conditions under which this social learning process occurs. In this study, we revisit this premise, theorizing that not all followers will equally regard the same ethical leader as being a personal ethical role model, thereby bounding the leader’s effects in reducing followers’ unethical behavior. We integrate the role of follower self-concepts into social learning theory, hypothesizing that the extent followers emulate their ethical leaders is contingent on how they identify with ethics (i.e., moral identity) as well as the particular leader (i.e., leader identification). We test our hypotheses with three-wave survey data collected from 214 employees, finding that ethical leaders are viewed as being role models only amongst followers higher in moral identity and leader identification, and that followers’ perceptions that the leader is an ethical role model mediated the effect of ethical leadership on followers’ unethical behavior. Interestingly, results for the full-model tests show that ethical leadership evokes unethical behavior amongst followers lower in both moral identity and leader identification. These results suggest that ethical leadership is not a universally useful practice to decrease unethical behavior and that a more nuanced understanding of its contingent effects needs to be better understood.

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Notes

  1. Although most items loaded nicely on their respective factors with standardized loadings coefficients being from .49 to .91, two items of moral identity (item 3 and item 4) loaded poorly on moral identity. A further check found that they are two reverse-scored items. Although it is acceptable to remove them because of the reverse-scored item bias (cf. Spector et al. 1997; Weijters et al. 2013), and the reliability of the remaining three items was a high 0.88, in data analysis we used the full five items. This is because they are original measurement items for the internalization dimension of moral identity scale and the development of these items has undergone a rigorous psychometric process (Aquino and Reed 2002). Meanwhile, the reliability of the full item measure (.70) is adequate for research (cf. Hair et al. 2010; Nunnally 1978) and consistent with those reported in other moral identity studies including that of Aquino and Reed themselves (2002; for others see Rupp et al. 2013; Sanders et al. 2018; Taylor et al. 2019; Van Quaquebeke et al. 2019), and the score of 3 items and that of 5 full items is highly correlated (r = 0.86, p < 0.01). For the sake of robustness, we re-ran the analysis to test all hypotheses using the reduced 3 items for moral identity and found that there is no difference in results based on the full 5 items and 3 items. Results of these analyses are available from the authors upon request.

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Funding

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number 71772193)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Organization and Human Resource Management, Business School, Central University of Finance and Economics, 39 South College Road, Beijing, 100081, China

    Zhen Wang

  2. School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University of China, 59 Zhongguancun Street, Beijing, 100872, China

    Lu Xing

  3. College of Business Administration, University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 S. Morgan St, Chicago, IL, 60607, USA

    Haoying Xu

  4. School of Business, Wake Forest University, 1834 Wake Forest Road, Winston-Salem, NC, 27106, USA

    Sean T. Hannah

Authors
  1. Zhen Wang
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  2. Lu Xing
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  3. Haoying Xu
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  4. Sean T. Hannah
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Correspondence to Zhen Wang.

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Wang, Z., Xing, L., Xu, H. et al. Not All Followers Socially Learn from Ethical Leaders: The Roles of Followers’ Moral Identity and Leader Identification in the Ethical Leadership Process. J Bus Ethics 170, 449–469 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04353-y

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