The Combined Effect of Ethical Leadership, Moral Identity, and Organizational Identification on Workplace Behavior

Abstract

Ethical leadership encompasses the personal conduct of leaders and leaders’ expectations that followers behave ethically. The two studies presented here draw on moral identity and social identity theories to investigate whether moral identity and organizational identification had an indirect effect on the relation between ethical leadership and organizational outcomes. Study 1 examined how ethical leadership and moral identity interact to influence self‐reported ethical behavior using a sample of 3,363 defense personnel. Study 2 examined the mediating role of organizational identification in the relation between ethical leadership and organizational outcomes, such as morale, job satisfaction, and career intentions using a sample of 3,390 military personnel. Consistent with moral identity research, personnel who reported stronger moral identity and who perceived their leaders as higher in ethical leadership were less likely to engage in unethical behavior. Consistent with organizational identification research, higher levels of perceived ethical leadership led to greater organizational identification, which then predicted organizational outcomes (i.e., morale, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions). The findings show the importance of ethical leadership and identity for organizational outcomes.

The interplay between ethical leadership and supervisor organizational embodiment on organizational identification and extra-role performance

“…Organizational identification renders organizational attributes such as goals, norms, and values salient and self-defining for individuals and constitutes a fundamental subtext upon which attitudes and behaviors are defined in the organization (Hogg & Terry, 2000;Lee et al, 2015). However, while past work found that ethical leadership may per se facilitate organizational identification (Bedi et al, 2016;O'Keefe et al, 2019;Qian & Jian, 2020;Zhu et al, 2015), we note that the current findings are based on the premise that leaders' ethical conduct is always representative of what the organization stands for (cf. Sluss et al, 2012).…”

Enhancing and Extending the Meta-Analytic Comparison of Newer Genre Leadership Forms

“…In other words, an ethical leader is a leader who is fair, honest, trustworthy, and principled decision-makers that behaves ethically in his/her personal and professional lives (Brown and Treviño, 2006 ; Charoensap et al, 2019 ). Moreover, ethical leaders do not only play the role of moral people by behaving ethically, but they also become moral managers such that they act as role models to influence followers to behave ethically as well (Brown and Treviño, 2006 ; O'Keefe et al, 2019 ). Two theories can rationalize how ethical leaders influence the followers' ethical behavior and standards: social learning theory (Bandura, 1977 ) and social exchange theory (Blau, 1964 ).…”

Ethical leadership and environment specific discretionary behaviour: The mediating role of green human resource management and moderating role of individual green values

“…While doing so, they ensure the enforcement of ethical standards (Peng & Kim, 2020). Thus, they hold employees accountable for their wrong deeds and appraise or punish accordingly (O'Keefe et al., 2019). Such leaders as moral people demonstrate ethical awareness, integrity, honesty, and fairness (Byun et al., 2018).…”