Ethical leadership: Exploring bottom-line mentality and trust perceptions of employees on middle-level managers

Abstract

With the increased competitiveness and significance of the workforce, the responsibility of organizational leaders has been increased to behave ethically and lead their followers in the best ethical way. This study aims to explore how the perception and trust of followers of their middle-level managers can shape the ethical behavior of middle managers and their bottom-line mentality. This qualitative study was conducted using semi-structured interviews from 10 employees of two Pakistani textile organizations—selecting five employees from each. Thematic analysis was used for data analysis. The findings reported that the bottom-line mentality demands are given priority. Thus, to achieve these demands, ethical values are being ignored while the nature of the task and attitude of the supervisor leads towards the social undermining of the employees. Furthermore, it has been found that leaders’ behavior and personality are more important in building trust and perception of employees, and this perception does not entail that leader will be acting ethically in real, but they are perceived to be. This study can provide valuable implications for policymakers, especially HR personnel, to device policies by considering ethical leadership practices. The findings of this research recommend that better performance and profit maximization by employees can be enhanced by reducing the bottom-line mentality of top management. Few scholars have elaborated on ethical leadership, the complexity of the leader–follower relationship, and individual perceptions. Behavioral aspects, bottom-line mentality, and trust from employees’ perspective in ethical leadership have received little attention. In addition, this research has taken a step forward by exploring the collectivist country of Pakistan.

The Construct of Bottom-Line Mentality: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going

“…The authors suggested that the incongruity between leader and employee BLM provoked a stronger, negative relationship with LMX that resulted in even lower employee performance. Also, relying on leader-member exchange arguments, a qualitative study suggested that top management BLM can affect supervisors' interpretations of work tasks as being difficult, as well as supervisors' poor attitudes, with the downstream effects of provoking supervisors' social undermining behaviors and decreasing their ethical leadership (Malik et al, 2022).…”

Psychological Safety and Innovative Work Behavior: Does Socially Responsible Leadership Matter?

“…A leader who embodies social responsibility is one who is sincere, compassionate, transparent, and supportive of two-way communication. Socially responsible leaders reassure their followers that looking out for the best interests of their staff is their top priority (Malik et al, 2023). Based on Bandura's (1977) social learning theory, earlier research has demonstrated that followers tend to learn from and attempt to imitate the actions of socially responsible leaders (Kyambade et al, 2023a) because they are viewed as role models.…”

Sharing or hiding? The influence of supervisor bottom-line mentality on employee knowledge behaviors

“…In summary, existing work on BLM has emphasized that BLM results in certain outcomes because of a "neglect of competing priorities," which is a central aspect of the BLM concept (Babalola et al, 2020;Greenbaum et al, 2012). To sum up, in today's business environment, the BLM is increasing; however, its consequences on leader-follower relationships are yet to be studied (Greenbaum et al, 2020a(Greenbaum et al, , 2020bMalik et al, 2022). Specifically, work on BLM has yet to examine the role of social rank within the group and other performance domains such as knowledge management.…”

“…In the workplace, leaders have great influence on employees within organizational settings (Malik et al, 2022), especially under the context of Chinese culture, in which strict hierarchy and active implementation among the upper and lower levels are emphasized. For example, leaders have considerable executive power requirements with which to control the behavior of subordinates (Zhang et al, 2021).…”