Linking ethical leadership to employee performance: The roles of leader-member exchange, self-efficacy, and organizational identification

By Fred Walumbwa, David M. Mayer, Peng Wang, Hui Wang, K. Workman, Amanda L. Christensen. 2011

964 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This research investigated the link between ethical leadership and performance using data from the People's Republic of China. Consistent with social exchange, social learning, and social identity theories, we examined leader-member exchange (LMX), self-efficacy, and organizational identification as mediators of the ethical leadership to performance relationship. Results from 72 supervisors and 201 immediate direct reports revealed that ethical leadership was positively and significantly related to employee performance as rated by their immediate supervisors and that this relationship was fully mediated by LMX, self-efficacy, and organizational identification, controlling for procedural fairness. We discuss implications of our findings for theory and practice.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73abd7d41e695efdd7c25a71148074088cf2472e

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In Demography

In Information Systems and Management

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Citations in the corpus

How Servant Leadership Influences Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Roles of LMX, Empowerment, and Proactive Personality (2017, background): “…has been a dearth of empirical work linking leadership behavior to LMX development, recent studies highlight a positive relationship between leadership behaviors such as transformational, moral or ethical leadership and follower perceptions of LMX (Gu 2015; Walumbwa et al. 2011; Wang et al. 2005).”
Ethical Leadership and Subordinate Outcomes: The Mediating Role of Organizational Politics and the Moderating Role of Political Skill (2013, methodology): “We then apply social exchange theory (e.g., Mayer et al. 2009; Rosen et al. 2009; Walumbwa et al. 2011) to our model and argue that the political environments enabled by those low in ethical leadership cause a violation of the implied employment contract under which subordinates expect to work.”
Organizational Identity and Organizational Identification (2013, background): “Employee OID has been found to be positively related to a number of leadership styles, including transformational leadership (Carmeli et al., 2011; Epitropaki & Martin, 2005; Liu, Zhu, & Yang, 2010) and ethical leadership (Walumbwa et al., 2011).”
What Have We Learned That Is Critical in Understanding Leadership Perceptions and Leader-Performance Relations? (2014, background): “Among the studies that examine effectiveness, however, attention is focused on how individual dispositions, such as traits (Judge et al., 2004) and specific behaviors (e.g., leading morally as an ethical leader; Walumbwa et al., 2011), augment or detract from a leader’s performance.”
Do Role Models Matter? An Investigation of Role Modeling as an Antecedent of Perceived Ethical Leadership (2014, background): “Additional research has found that supervisory ethical leadership is especially important in promoting positive and reducing negative employee behaviors in organizations (Kacmar et al. 2011; Mayer et al. 2009, 2012; Walumbwa and Schaubroeck 2009; Walumbwa et al. 2011).”
The Influence of Ethical Leadership and Regulatory Focus on Employee Outcomes (2013, background): “Despite evidence from our study and others (e.g., Piccolo et al., 2010; Walumbwa et al., 2011) that the Brown et al. (2005) measure can be characterized as unidimensional, some researchers using other measures of ethical leadership have found ethical leadership to be multidimensional (e.g., De…”
The Nexus of Ethical Leadership, Job Performance, and Turnover Intention: The Mediating Role of Job Satisfaction (2018, background): “However, relatively less attention has been paid to probe the nexus of ethical leadership, employees’ job performance [4-6] and their intention to leave the organization [7].”
Ethical leadership, employee well-being, and helping: The moderating role of human resource management. (2012, background): “For instance, ethical leadership positively relates to in-role performance (Piccolo, Greenbaum, Den Hartog, & Folger, 2010; Walumbwa et al., 2011) and helping (Kalshoven, Den Hartog, & De Hoogh, 2011; Mayer, Kuenzi, Greenbaum, Bardes, & Salvador, 2009).”