Despite the proliferation of research on ethical leadership, there remains a limited understanding of how specifically the assumingly moral component of this leadership style affects employee behavior. Taking an identity perspective, we integrate the ethical leadership literature with research on the dynamics of the moral self-concept to posit that ethical leadership will foster a sense of moral identity among employees, which then inspires followers to adopt more ethical actions, such as increased organization citizenship behavior (OCB). We further argue that these identity effects should be more pronounced when leaders are perceived to be group prototypical, as their actions then speak louder to followers' sense of identity. Two studiesa scenario experiment with 138 participants and a field study with 225 employees-provided support for our hypothesized moderated mediation model. Perceived ethical leadership positively affected OCB via followers' moral identity but only under conditions of high perceived leader group prototypicality. We discuss how the identity pathway of ethical leadership can facilitate novel theorizing about moral transference. Our findings also suggest that, when hiring external ethical leaders or training internal managers, practitioners are well advised to consider that these individuals may only be effective in morally transforming followers when they are perceived as prototypical for the group.

PurposeWe investigate the role of gender in linking communicative acts that occur in the interactions of self-managed teams to emergent leadership. Specifically, this study presents a framework that differentiates between agentic and communal task- and relations-oriented communication as predictors of emergent leadership, and it hypothesizes that men and women do not differ in what they say but do differ in how they are rewarded (i.e. ascribed informal leadership responsibilities) for their statements.Design/methodology/approachInteraction coding was used to capture the meeting communication of 116 members of 41 self-managed teams.FindingsMen and women exhibited the same amount of agentic and communal task- and relations-oriented communication and were equally likely to emerge as leaders. However, men experienced an emergent leadership advantage when engaging in agentic and communal task-oriented behaviors. Agentic and communal relations-oriented behaviors did not predict emergent leadership.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings imply that theories could be more precise in differentiating between objective behaviors (i.e. actor perspective) and perceptions thereof (i.e. observer perspective) to understand why women experience a disadvantage in assuming leadership roles.Practical implicationsAlthough women displayed the same verbal behaviors as men, they experienced different consequences. Organizations can provide unconscious bias training programs, which help increase employees' self-awareness of a potential positive assessment bias toward men's communication.Originality/valueThis research utilizes an innovative, fine-grained coding approach to gather data that add to previous studies showing that, unlike men, women experience a disadvantage in terms of emergent leadership ascriptions when they deviate from stereotypically expected behavior.

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