Examining the Cognitive and Affective Trust-Based Mechanisms Underlying the Relationship Between Ethical Leadership and Organisational Citizenship: A Case of the Head Leading the Heart?

By Alexander Newman, Kohyar Kiazad, Qing Miao, B. Cooper. 2014

230 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we investigate the trust-based mechanisms underlying the relationship between ethical leadership and followers’ organisational citizenship behaviours (OCBs). Based on three-wave survey data obtained from 184 employees and their supervisors, we find that ethical leadership leads to higher levels of both affective and cognitive trust. In addition, we find support for a three-path mediational model, where cognitive trust and affective trust, in turn, mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and follower OCBs. That is to say, we found that ethical leadership leads to the development of cognitive trust, which subsequently influences the development of affective trust. Affective trust, in turn, induces followers to exhibit OCBs as a means of reciprocating the leader’s favourable behaviour. Our findings suggest that both affective and cognitive trust plays an important role in the social exchange processes that underlie the relationship between ethical leadership and the discretionary behaviour of followers.

Subfields: Demography, Information Systems and Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3ec8f4058d1c86594f3ab9531fcfc93bc3c295c5

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Citations in the corpus

Predictors of Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Ethical Leadership and Workplace Jealousy (2014, background): “The trustful atmosphere nurtured by ethical leaders (Chughtai et al. 2014; Newman et al. 2014) can also facilitate the exchange of helping behaviors between employees, a manifestation of employee OCBI.”
Collective Efficacy: Linking Paternalistic Leadership to Organizational Commitment (2018, result): “Previous studies have also noticed the importance of leaders’ ethical behavior (Demirtas, and Akdogan 2015; Newman et al. 2014), however, they did not focus on the relationship between moral leadership and collective efficacy.”
Ethical leadership and employee knowledge sharing: Exploring dual-mediation paths (2017, background): “Second, while majority of past studies on ethical leadership rely upon theoretical perspectives such as social exchange theory (e.g., Mo & Shi, 2015; Newman et al., 2014) and social identity theory (e.g., DeConinck, 2015; Zhu et al., 2015) to explain the e ﬀ ect of ethical leadership on employee…”
Exploring the impact of ethical leadership on job satisfaction and organizational commitment in public sector organizations: the mediating role of psychological empowerment (2019, background): “2012), and various scholars have suggested paying more attention to understand how these influential activities operated in ethical leadership (Bouckenooghe et al. 2015; Newman et al. 2014; Newman and Sheikh 2012; Walumbwa et al. 2011).”
A Meta-analytic Review of Ethical Leadership Outcomes and Moderators (2016, background): “ethical leadership and cognitive trust in the leader (Dadhich and Bhal 2008; Newman et al. 2013).”
An Identity Perspective on Ethical Leadership to Explain Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Interplay of Follower Moral Identity and Leader Group Prototypicality (2019, background): “2015a, b) but can also inspire positive employees’ behavior, such as OCB (Avey et al. 2011; Kacmar et al. 2011; Mo and Shi 2017; Newman et al. 2014).”
When Do Ethical Leaders Become Less Effective? The Moderating Role of Perceived Leader Ethical Conviction on Employee Discretionary Reactions to Ethical Leadership (2019, background): “…is positively linked with discretionary behaviors intended to benefit the organization as well as coworkers (organizational citizenship behavior: OCB; Newman et al. 2014; Piccolo et al. 2010) and negatively linked with discretionary behavior that violates significant organizational norms, thereby…”