![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Public management scholars have lamented the lack of research examining the influence of ethical leadership on employee behaviors in the public sector. Using a multi-source dataset of 196 public employees in 44 work units, we sought to address this gap by examining how and when ethical leadership influences employee job performance (i.e., task performance and citizenship behaviors). Drawing on social exchange theory, we propose that ethical leadership behavior exhibited by supervisors will influence perceptions of interpersonal justice, which, in turn, will positively impact employee job performance. In addition, we hypothesize that the effect of interpersonal justice perceptions will be moderated by public service motivation. Our findings reveal that the influence of ethical leadership was fully mediated by perceptions of interpersonal justice. This influence, in turn, was moderated by public service motivation, such that those with lower public service motivation were most strongly affected by interpersonal justice perceptions. The findings provide support for our proposed moderated mediation model. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.
Notes
Social exchange theory (SET) (Blau Citation1964) and a social learning theory (SLT) (Bandura Citation1977; Citation1986) are generally regarded as primary mechanisms by which ethical leadership influences employee behaviors (Brown, Treviño, and Harrison Citation2005). From a SLT perspective, ethical leaders could be viewed as credible and legitimate role models, and followers can observe, learn from, and replicate appropriate behaviors of these role models (Brown, Treviño, and Harrison Citation2005). However, we would argue that SLT is more relevant for examining outcome variables that are directly conceptually related to ethical leadership (e.g., ethical climate and (un)ethical behaviors) than for examining performance-related outcomes. Indeed, several studies have used SLT as their central framework for studying these ethics-related constructs. For example, Neubert et al. (Citation2009) showed that ethical leadership had a positive effect on ethical climate, whereas Mayer et al. (Citation2009) showed that top management ethical leadership had a positive trickle-down effect on supervisory ethical leadership. In another study, Mayer et al. (Citation2012) found that ethical leadership was negatively related to unit-level unethical behavior and relationship conflicts. More recently, Zhang et al. (Citation2013) found that ethical leadership had a negative relationship with perceived organizational politics.
Cognition-based trust refers to an evaluation of authorities based on their track records, such as abilities, integrity, and benevolence (McAllister Citation1995).
As our data were also nested within bureaus (third-level structure), we examined whether there were any systematic differences between the bureaus in the main variables. The average number of respondents per bureau was 17.81 (SD = 8.18), with a minimum of 12 responses and a maximum of 30 responses. We conducted a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), where bureaus were treated as a predictor and ethical leadership, interpersonal justice, task performance, OCB-I, and OCB-O as outcome variables. The results indicated that there were no significant differences between bureaus with respect to ethical leadership [F(10, 195) = 1.65, p = .09]; interpersonal justice [F(10, 195) = 1.44, p = .16]; task performance [F(10, 195) = 1.13, p = .33]; OCB-I [F(10, 195) = .97, p = .47]; or OCB-O [F(10, 195) = .71, p = .70]. This indicates that using two-level HLM is appropriate for this present study.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Wisanupong Potipiroon
Wisanupong Potipiroon ([email protected]) is a lecturer of Organizational Behavior in the Department of Public Administration, Faculty of Management Sciences at Prince of Songkla University in Thailand. He received his PhD in Public Management from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany and a Master's degree in Human Resources and Organizations from Cornell University. His research areas include managerial leadership, organizational justice, workplace incivility, organizational corruption, and public service motivation.
Sue Faerman
Sue Faerman ([email protected]) is a Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany. Her research interests focus on the paradoxical nature of managerial leadership and organizational performance, women and leadership, and management education and development; and she is co-author of Becoming a Master Manager: A Competency Framework. Currently, she serves as the Academic Chair of the Women's Leadership Academy at the University at Albany's Center for Women in Government & Civil Society.