Purpose
This study aims to adopt a follower-centric approach in leadership and ethics research by investigating the impact of implicit followership theories (IFTs) on followers’ constructive resistance to leaders’ unethical requests. Specifically, it analyzes the mediating role of organizational citizenship behavior in the relationship between IFTs and constructive resistance. Indeed, this study aims to examine whether followers with more positive beliefs about the characteristics that a follower should have IFTs are more likely to resist unethical leadership and whether this relationship is mediated by organizational citizenship behavior as volunteering acts that exceed the formal job requirements.
Design/methodology/approach
The proposed hypotheses were tested using survey data from 273 employees working in a steel manufacturer company in Iran. The variance-based structural equation modeling technique was used to analyze data.
Findings
The results show that followership antiprototype negatively affects both follower’s constructive resistance and organizational citizenship behavior. Furthermore, organizational citizenship behavior mediates the relationship between IFTs and follower’s constructive resistance. Also, both followership prototype and organizational citizenship behavior have a positive effect on follower’s constructive resistance.
Originality/value
Contrary to the dominant leader-centric approach in leadership and organizational ethics research, few studies have examined the role of followers and their characteristics. The results of this study provide important insights into the role of followers in resistance against the leader’s unethical request.
In two studies about farming practices, the respondents who are particularly favorable to organic farming tend to have a higher intention to convert their farm to organic when they perceive other farmers as not very favorable to this practice. This intention can be considered as anticonformist, as it is in opposition to the general view of others. This article hypothesizes that this phenomenon can be explained by some biases on the perceptions of attitudes. It proposes an agent-based model which computes an intention based on the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and assumes some biases in the perception of others' attitudes according to the social judgment theory. It investigates the conditions on the model parameter values for which the simulations reproduce the features observed in the studies. The results show that perceptual biases are a possible explanation of anticonformist intentions.
In this paper, we propose a market model which is based on reputation and reinforcement learning algorithms for buying and selling agents. Three important factors: quality, price and delivery-time are considered in the model. We take into account the fact that buying agents can have different priorities on quality, price and delivery-time of their goods and selling agents adjust their bids according to buying agents preferences. Also we have assumed that multiple selling agents may offer the same goods with different qualities, prices and delivery-times. In our model, selling agents learn to maximize their expected profits by using reinforcement learning to adjust product quality, price and delivery-time. Also each selling agent models the reputation of buying agents based on their profits for that seller and uses this reputation to consider discount for reputable buying agents. Buying agents learn to model the reputation of selling agents based on different features of goods: reputation on quality, reputation on price and reputation on delivery-time to avoid interaction with disreputable selling agents. The model has been implemented with Aglet and tested in a large-sized marketplace. The results show that selling/buying agents that model the reputation of buying/selling agents obtain more satisfaction rather than selling/buying agents who only use the reinforcement learning.
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