A cross-level study of the relationship between ethical leadership and employee constructive deviance: Effects of moral self-efficacy and psychological safety climate

Abstract

Constructive deviance describes acts that benefit the organization by deviating from outdated organizational norms. Despite emerging interest in this behavior, questions remain about why and how constructive deviance occurs. This paper integrates social learning and uncertainty reduction theories, and develops a multilevel model linking team-level ethical leadership to employee constructive deviance. Surveying 313 subordinates and 52 supervisors from 15 different companies in eastern China, we find that team-level ethical leadership has a positive impact on employee constructive deviance, and that both psychological safety climate and employee moral self-efficacy partially mediate this relationship. In addition, we find a positive cross-level moderating effect of psychological safety climate. These findings contribute to understanding employees’ constructive deviance in the workplace, and provide valuable implications for managerial practices.

Effective practices for improving service professionals’ ethical behaviors: A multiple method study

“…Action control practices refer to managing the specific routine and some actions by the process control approach and a series of systems, e.g., process control and certain auditing systems ( Van Hooft et al, 2005 ; Kaptein, 2009 ; Merchant and Van der Stede, 2012 ; Endenich and Trapp, 2020 ). Result control practices refer to managing behaviors by the provision of reward incentives and punishments according to realized results and specific practices, e.g., reward and punishment approaches ( Kaptein, 2009 ; Merchant and Van der Stede, 2012 ; Jannat et al, 2022 ; Shang and Yang, 2022 ). The literature on the practices of ethics programs has proposed some common practices and their categorizations, but has not been definitive about the major practices within each category of ethics programs.…”