A three-level examination of the cascading effects of ethical leadership on employee outcomes: A moderated mediation analysis

By Gukdo Byun, Steven J. Karau, Ye Dai, Soojin Lee. Journal of business research, 2018

89 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Based on social learning theory, we developed a moderated-mediation model of trickle-down effects to test how the ethical leadership of high-level leaders influences the ethical leadership of low-level leaders and the work outcomes of subordinate employees. Data were collected from 224 leader-employee dyads at six large companies in South Korea. The results of hierarchical regression analyses provided support for this model. Our results indicated that the ethical leadership of high-level leaders trickles down to low-level leaders, which then reduces the social loafing of employees while increasing their task performance. We also found that the self-enhancement motives of low-level leaders moderate the positive relationship between the ethical leadership of high and low-level leaders in a way that strengthens this relationship when the motives are low rather than high. This finding further suggests that low levels of self-enhancement motives strengthen the indirect effects of ethical, high-level leadership on employee social loafing and task performance.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9958152302a00b1835858be5d622ed4aa55ab8c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. Andrés Salas‐Vallina
2. Bashir Ahmad
3. Masood Nawaz Kalyar
4. Imran Shafique

In Information Systems and Management

1. Bashir Ahmad
2. Masood Nawaz Kalyar
3. Imran Shafique

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Andrés Salas‐Vallina
2. Rafael Fernández-Guerrero
3. Bashir Ahmad
4. Cristina Simone
5. Masood Nawaz Kalyar
6. Imran Shafique

Citations in the corpus

• The human side of leadership: Inspirational leadership effects on follower characteristics and happiness at work (HAW) (2020, background): “However, leadership is becoming less ethical (Byun et al., 2018), and there is increasing interest in obtaining short-term results.”
• The Nexus of Ethical Leadership, Job Performance, and Turnover Intention: The Mediating Role of Job Satisfaction (2018, background): “There are only few studies that considered social learning context of Brown, Treviño, and Harrison [8] as an influential model to explain how and why ethical leadership links and affects employee job performance [9].”