Ethical leadership and follower unethical pro-organizational behavior: examining the dual influence mechanisms of affective and continuance commitments

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the indirect effects of ethical leadership on unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). We primarily examine how two types of organizational commitment (i.e. affective commitment and continuance commitment) mediate the effect of the supervisors’ ethical leadership on their followers’ UPB. Collecting data from 291 employees in South Korea, at two points in time, we found that ethical leadership has a negative relationship with follower UPB through affective commitment and has a positive relationship with follower UPB through continuance commitment. Furthermore, follower organizational identification moderates the mediation processes, which makes the affective commitment-UPB relationship more negative but the continuance commitment-UPB relationship more positive when the followers more closely identify with their organization. We also discuss the theoretical contributions and practical implications.

Keywords:

• Ethical leadership
• unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB)
• affective commitment
• continuance commitment
• organizational identification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available because they contain information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.