Two Lighthouses to Navigate: Effects of Ideal and Counter-Ideal Values on Follower Identification and Satisfaction with Their Leaders

Ideals (or ideal values) help people to navigate in social life. They indicate at a very fundamental level what people are concerned about, what they strive for, and what they want to be affiliated with. Transferring this to a leader–follower analysis, our first study (n = 306) confirms that followers’ identification and satisfaction with their leaders are stronger, the more leaders match followers’ ideal leader values. Study 2 (n = 244) extends the perspective by introducing the novel concept of counter-ideals (i.e., how an ideal leader should not be) as a second, non-redundant point of reference. Results confirm that a leader’s match on ideal and on counter-ideal values have independent effects in that both explain unique variance in followers’ identification and satisfaction with their leader. Study 3 (n = 136) replicates the previous results in an experimental scenario study and provides evidence for the proposed causal direction of the underlying process. We conclude that counter-ideal values might be an additional point of reference that people use to triangulate targets above and beyond ideal values and discuss the implications of our findings for value research and management.     

Ethical leadership in Chinese organizations: Developing a scale

In light of a series of ethical scandals in China in recent years, this research aims to develop a reliable and valid scale to measure ethical leadership, namely the “ethical leadership measure (ELM).” Our results show that ELM is strongly and positively correlated with scales for authentic leadership, ethical leadership, idealized influence, and a recently-developed leadership virtues questionnaire (LVQ); and negatively correlated with laissez-faire leadership and passive management by exception. ELM is also found to be positively related to followers’ job satisfaction, affective commitment, trust in leader, organizational citizenship behavior, and moral identity, and negatively related to followers’ intention to quit.     

Two Independent Value Orientations: Ideal and Counter-Ideal Leader Values and Their Impact on Followers’ Respect for and Identification with Their Leaders

Traditionally, conceptualizations of human values are based on the assumption that individuals possess a single integrated value system comprising those values that people are attracted by and strive for. Recently, however, van Quaquebeke et al. (in J Bus Ethics 93:293–305, 2010) proposed that a value system might consist of two largely independent value orientations—an orientation of ideal values and an orientation of counter-ideal values (values that individuals are repelled by), and that both orientations exhibit antithetic effects on people’s responses to the social world. Following a call for further research on this distinction, we conducted two studies to assess the independent effects of ideal and counter-ideal values in leadership settings. Study 1 (N = 131) finds both value orientations to explain unique variance in followers’ vertical respect for their leaders. Study 2 (N = 136) confirms these results and additionally shows an analogous effect for followers’ identification with their leaders. Most importantly, we find that both value orientations exhibit their effects only independently when the content of the two orientations pertain to different value types in Schwartz’s (in J Soc Issues 50:19–46, 1994) circumplex model. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

打开领导有效性的黑箱:领导行为和领导下属关系研究

This study is an integration of the leader-focused perspective and leader-follower exchange perspective, attempting to understand the relationship between leadership styles, leader-member relationship, and their joint impact on followers’ effectiveness, satisfaction, extra effort and organizational commitment. 615 respondents from five big pharmaceutical companies in China participated in this study. Results show that: (1) transformational leadership has positive influence on followers’ effectiveness, satisfaction, extra effort and organizational commitment; contingent reward has positive influence on effectiveness; management-by-exception leadership has negative influence on satisfaction; laissez-faire leadership has negative influence on effectiveness and satisfaction. (2) Leader-member exchange partially mediates the relationship between transformational, contingent reward, management-by-exception, laissez-faire leaderships and followers’ effectiveness, extra effort, satisfaction and organizational commitment. Translated and revised from Guanli shijie 맜理世界(Management World), 2006, (9): 87–93     

The Relationship Between Leaders’ Group-Oriented Values and Follower Identification with and Endorsement of Leaders: The Moderating Role of Leaders’ Group Membership

In this article, we hypothesize that leaders who display group-oriented values (i.e., values that focus on the welfare of the group rather than on the self-interest of the leader) will be evaluated more positively by their followers than leaders who do not display group-oriented values. Importantly, we expected these effects to be more pronounced for leaders who are ingroup members (i.e., stemming from the same social group as their followers) than for leaders who are outgroup members (i.e., leaders stemming from a different social group than their followers). We tested our hypotheses in two studies. Results of a field study (N = 95) showed the expected relationship between leaders’ group-oriented values and followers’ identification with their leaders. A scenario study (N = 137) replicated the results and extended it to followers’ endorsement of their leaders. Overall, these findings suggest that displaying group-oriented values pays off more for ingroup than for outgroup leaders.     

Defining Respectful Leadership: What It Is,How It Can Be Measured,and Another Glimpse at What It Is Related to

Research on work values shows that respectful leadership is highly desired by employees. On the applied side, however, the extant research does not offer many insights as to which concrete leadership behaviors are perceived by employees as indications of respectful leadership. Thus, to offer such insights, we collected and content analyzed employees’ narrations of encounters with respectful leadership (N ₁ = 426). The coding process resulted in 19 categories of respectful leadership spanning 149 leadership behaviors. Furthermore, to also harness this comprehensive repertoire for quantitative organizational research, we undertook two more studies (N _2a = 228; N _2b = 412) to empirically derive a feasible item-based measurement of respectful leadership and assess its psychometric qualities. In these studies, we additionally investigated the relationships between respectful leadership as assessed with this new measurement and employees’ vertical and contextual followership as assessed via subordinates’ identification with their leaders, their appraisal respect for their leaders, their feeling of self-determination, and their job satisfaction.     

Work Engagement and Machiavellianism in the Ethical Leadership Process

Leaders who express an ethical identity are proposed to affect followers’ attitudes and work behaviors. In two multi-source studies, we first test a model suggesting that work engagement acts as a mediator in the relationships between ethical leadership and employee initiative (a form of organizational citizenship behavior) as well as counterproductive work behavior. Next, we focus on whether ethical leadership always forms an authentic expression of an ethical identity, thus in the second study, we add leader Machiavellianism to the model. For Machiavellian leaders, the publicly expressed identity of ethical leadership is inconsistent with the privately held unethical Machiavellian norms. Literature on surface acting suggests people can at least to some extent pick up on such inauthentic displays, making the effects less strong. We thus argue that the positive effects of ethical leader behavior are likely to be suppressed when leaders are highly Machiavellian. Support for this moderated mediation model was found: The effects of ethical leader behavior on engagement are less strong when ethical leaders are high as opposed to low on Machiavellianism.     

Bad Apples,Bad Barrels,and Broken Followers? An Empirical Examination of Contextual Influences on Follower Perceptions and Reactions to Aversive Leadership

Research on destructive leadership has largely focused on leader characteristics thought to be responsible for harmful organizational outcomes. Recent findings, however, demonstrate the need to examine important contextual factors underlying such processes. Thus, the present study sought to determine the effects of an organization’s climate and financial performance, as well as the leader’s gender, on subordinate perceptions of and reactions (i.e., whistle-blowing intentions) to aversive leadership, a form of destructive leadership based on coercive power. 302 undergraduate participants read through a series of vignettes describing a fictional organization, its employees, and an aversive leader in charge of the company’s sales department. They were then asked to envision themselves as subordinates of the leader and respond to several quantitative measures and open-ended questions. Consistent with Padilla and colleagues' (2007) toxic triangle theory, results suggest that both perceptions and reactions to aversive leadership depend on the three aforementioned factors. Specifically, aversive leaders were perceived more aversively and elicited greater whistle-blowing intentions in financially unstable organizations possessing climates intolerant of negative leader behavior. Moreover, female aversive leaders were perceived more aversively than their male counterparts under such conditions. Theoretical and practical implications as well as future research directions are also discussed.     

Remote Leadership,Communication Effectiveness and Leader Performance

As remote work arrangements have gained in popularity, workforce dispersion has become increasingly widespread. Little research to date has examined how physical distance influences leader–follower communication effectiveness or leader performance. Building on top of transformational leadership theory, this paper explores how perceived leader performance is influenced by leadership style, physical distance, and communication effectiveness between leaders and followers. A survey of 138 followers, reporting to a total of 41 leaders, was conducted and data were analyzed at the individual follower-level using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique. Our model explained 45% of the variance in communication effectiveness and 67% of the variance in perceived leader performance. Consistent with past empirical findings, transformational leadership was associated more strongly with perceived leader performance than transactional contingent reward leadership. Communication effectiveness was also a strong predictor of leader performance, and furthermore acted as a mediator of leadership behavior on performance. Surprisingly, distance had no influence on either communication effectiveness or perceived leader performance. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Brand Authenticity: Testing the Antecedents and Outcomes of Brand Management's Passion for its Products

While customer orientation is accepted as a core marketing principle, this research suggests that an opposing orientation—product orientation—may offer an advantage. Managers who follow a product orientation focus on products that interest and inspire them rather than on products that fulfill consumers’ desires. This research suggests that a consumer's perception that managers follow a product orientation is consistent with prior conceptualizations of brand authenticity. That research suggests that brands perceived as authentic are evaluated more positively, yet that research does not empirically assess brand authenticity's effects nor suggest its antecedents. To fill this gap, the authors develop a conceptualization and model of brand authenticity grounded in self‐determination theory, attribution theory, and extant authentic human brand research. Brand authenticity is defined as the extent to which consumers perceive that a brand's managers are intrinsically motivated in that they are passionate about and devoted to providing their products. The model proposes four antecedents of brand authenticity—two related to rare brand behaviors (uniqueness and scarcity), and two related to stable brand behaviors (longevity and longitudinal consistency). It also proposes two perceptual outcomes of brand authenticity—expected quality and trust. Two 2 × 2 experiments (n = 136 for Study 1; n = 155 for Study 2) demonstrate a positive impact of the antecedents on brand authenticity and of brand authenticity on the outcomes. Brand authenticity mediates these effects.     

An Empirical Study of Leader Ethical Values,Transformational and Transactional Leadership,and Follower Attitudes Toward Corporate Social Responsibility

Several leadership and ethics scholars suggest that the transformational leadership process is predicated on a divergent set of ethical values compared to transactional leadership. Theoretical accounts declare that deontological ethics should be associated with transformational leadership while transactional leadership is likely related to teleological ethics. However, very little empirical research supports these claims. Furthermore, despite calls for increasing attention as to how leaders influence their followers’ perceptions of the importance of ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) for organizational effectiveness, no empirical study to date has assessed the comparative impact of transformational and transactional leadership styles on follower CSR attitudes. Data from 122 organizational leaders and 458 of their followers indicated that leader deontological ethical values (altruism, universal rights, Kantian principles, etc.) were strongly associated with follower ratings of transformational leadership, while leader teleological ethical values (utilitarianism) were related to follower ratings of transactional leadership. As predicted, only transformational leadership was associated with follower beliefs in the stakeholder view of CSR. Implications for the study and practice of ethical leadership, future research directions, and management education are discussed.     

Impact of Ethical Leadership and Leader–Member Exchange on Whistle Blowing: The Moderating Impact of the Moral Intensity of the Issue

Given the prevalence of corporate frauds and the significance of whistle blowing as a mechanism to report about the frauds, the present study explores the impact of ethical leadership and leader–member exchange (LMX) on whistle blowing. Additionally, the article also explores the moderating role of the moral intensity [studied as magnitude of consequences (MOC)] of the issue on this relationship. The article reports results of three experimental studies conducted on the postgraduate students of a premier technology institute in India. Ethical leadership, LMX, and moral intensity are manipulated through scenarios. Study one (n = 81) manipulates ethical leadership (ethical/unethical) and quality of LMX (low and high) as independent variables; study two (n = 80) manipulates ethical leadership and moral intensity (high and low MOC), and study three (n = 87) manipulates LMX and MOCs to assess their individual and joint effects on whistle blowing. Results show that not only do ethical leadership and LMX predict whistle blowing, but these relationships get moderated by the moral intensity of the issue as well.     

When Leadership Goes Unnoticed: The Moderating Role of Follower Self-Esteem on the Relationship Between Ethical Leadership and Follower Behavior

The authors examined the effects of ethical leadership on follower organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and deviant behavior. Drawing upon research related to the behavioral plasticity hypothesis, the authors examined a moderating role of follower self- esteem in these relationships. Results from a field study revealed that ethical leadership is positively related to follower OCB and negatively related to deviance. We found that these relationships are moderated by followers’ self-esteem, such that the relationships between ethical leadership and OCB as well as between ethical leadership and deviant behavior are weaker when followers’ self-esteem is high than low. Implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.     

A Multi-level Investigation of Authentic Leadership as an Antecedent of Helping Behavior

We develop and test a trickle-down model of how authentic leadership at the department level flows down the organizational hierarchy to encourage team leader authentic leadership and consequently, promotes team and individual-level supervisor-directed helping behavior. Analyses of multi-level and multi-source data collected from a total of 487 employees comprising 122 teams, 47 departments, and 4 different working areas of a major public sector organization in Taiwan show that team leaders’ authentic leadership mediates the relationship between departmental authentic leadership and individual-level leader–member exchange (LMX). We also found that intra-team trust completely mediates the influence of team authentic leadership on both team helping behavior and individual-level supervisor-directed helping behavior. Finally, the results reveal that self-concordance mediates the influence of team authentic leadership on individual-level supervisor helping behavior as well as the influence of individual-level LMX on individual-level supervisor-directed helping behavior. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">The Sound of Silence – A Space for Morality?</Emphasis> The Role of Solitude for Ethical Decision Making

Building on research and measures on solitude, ethical leadership theories, and decision making literatures, we propose a conceptual model to better understand processes enabling ethical leadership neglected in the literature. The role of solitude as antecedent is explored in this model, whereby its selective utilization focuses inner directionality toward growing authentic executive awareness as a moral person and a moral manager and allows an integration between inner and outer directionality toward ethical leadership and resulting decision-making processes that will have an impact on others’ perceptions of leader authentic ethical leadership. Thus it is proposed that utilization of solitude positively predicts executive-level authentic ethical leadership action and in turn, ethical decision making perceived fairness and integrity. We also propose two moderators, strengthening the hypothesized (positive) association between solitude and ethical leadership; these are the executive’s ability for moral reasoning and a motivation for socialized (as opposed to personalized) power.     

Ethical Leader Behavior and Big Five Factors of Personality

Most research on ethical leadership to date investigates the consequences of ethical leadership rather than its antecedents. Here, we aim to contribute to this field by studying leader personality as a potential antecedent of ethical leader behavior. In two multisource studies, we investigated the relationships between personality traits and ethical leader behavior. Leader personality was measured through self-ratings using the five-factor personality framework. Two subordinates rated their leaders’ ethical behavior. Study 1 used a uni-dimensional Ethical Leadership Scale (ELS). In study 2 we used this scale as well as an instrument distinguishing three different ethical leader behaviors, namely, fairness, role clarification, and power sharing. Further, in study 2 we controlled for the influence of the relationship between leader and followers (LMX). As expected, conscientiousness and agreeableness were most consistently related to ethical leadership. In study 1, after controlling for the other personality traits, conscientiousness related positively with ethical leadership. In study 2, after controlling for other traits and LMX, conscientiousness related positively with ethical leadership and the behavior role clarification, and agreeableness with power sharing and fairness. Also, emotional stability related positively with ethical leadership and role clarification after controlling for LMX. As expected, openness to experience and extraversion were unrelated to ethical leader behaviors.     

Ethical Leadership: Examining the Relationships with Full Range Leadership Model,Employee Outcomes,and Organizational Culture

Leadership which lacks ethical conduct can be dangerous, destructive, and even toxic. Ethical leadership, though well discussed in the literature, has been tested empirically as a construct in very few studies. An empirical investigation of ethical leadership in Singapore’s construction industry is reported. It is found that ethical leadership is positively and significantly associated with transformational leadership, transformational culture of organization, contingent reward dimension of transactional leadership, leader effectiveness, employee willingness to put in extra effort, and employee satisfaction with the leader. However, it is also found that ethical leadership bears no correlations with transactional leadership. Also, it is negatively correlated with laissez-faire leadership and transactional culture of the organization. The findings also reveal that ethical leadership plays a mediating role in the relationship between employee outcomes and organizational culture. Practical implications of these findings are discussed. Directions for future research are also suggested.     

Do Role Models Matter? An Investigation of Role Modeling as an Antecedent of Perceived Ethical Leadership

Thus far, we know much more about the significant outcomes of perceived ethical leadership than we do about its antecedents. In this study, we focus on multiple types of ethical role models as antecedents of perceived ethical leadership. According to social learning theory, role models facilitate the acquisition of moral and other types of behavior. Yet, we do not know whether having had ethical role models influences follower perceptions of one’s ethical leadership and, if so, what kinds of role models are important. We conducted a field study, surveying supervisors and their subordinates to examine the relationship between three types of ethical role models and ethical leadership: the leader’s childhood role models, career mentors, and top managers. We found that having had an ethical role model during the leader’s career was positively related to subordinate-rated ethical leadership. As expected, this effect was moderated by leader age, such that the relationship between career mentoring and ethical leadership was stronger for older leaders. Leader age also moderated the relationship between childhood models and ethical leadership ratings, such that having had childhood ethical role models was more strongly and positively related to ethical leadership for younger leaders. We found no effect for top management ethical role models. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Ethical Leadership Evaluations After Moral Transgression: Social Distance Makes the Difference

In light of continuing corporate scandals, the study of ethical leadership remains an important area of research which helps to understand the antecedents and consequences of ethical behavior in organizations. The present study investigates how social distance influences ethical leadership evaluations, and how in turn ethical leadership evaluations affect leader–member exchange (LMX) after a leader’s moral transgression. Based on construal level theory, we propose that higher social distance will lead to more severe evaluations of immoral behavior and therefore entail lower ethical leadership ratings. More- over, we hypothesize that ethical leadership will positively affect LMX. Participants read a scenario describing a moral situation in which a leader, who was presented in either high or low social distance, behaves unethically toward an employee. We tested our predictions using a structural equation modeling approach. As expected, participants in the high social distance condition judged leaders more harshly (i.e., they gave lower ethical leadership ratings) than in the low social distance condition. Thus, social distance moderated the extent to which leaders are perceived as ethical leaders after moral transgression. Moreover, in accordance with our proposition, ethical leadership ratings had a positive influence on LMX.     

Perceived Behavioral Integrity: Relationships with Employee Attitudes, Well-Being, and Absenteeism

Relationships between the behavioral integrity of managers as perceived by employees and employee attitudes (job satisfaction and life satisfaction), well-being (stress and health), and behaviors (absenteeism) were tested using data from the 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce (n = 2,820). Using multivariate and univariate analysis, perceived behavioral integrity (PBI) was positively related to job and life satisfaction and negatively related to stress, poor health, and absenteeism. The effect size for the relationship with job satisfaction was medium-to-large while the effect sizes with respect to the other variables were small-to-medium. There was no support for the hypotheses that women would perceive lower levels of behavioral integrity and that the strength of the relationships between PBI and the outcomes variables would be stronger among women than among men.