| Leader unethical pro-organizational behavior(UPB)refers to leaders violating the core social value,moral principles,and even laws to benefit the organization or its members.Many social have argued that,although leader UPB may bring short-term benefits,it will damage the organizations and society in the long run.For instance,in China,the case of Luckin Coffee embodied leader UPB as well.In 2019,former CEO Zhiya Qian and COO Jian Liu fabricated more than $310 million in sales to lure investors toward the company’s “aggressive growth”.Eventually,the stock price of Luckin Coffee declined over 75% due to the scandals and resulted in the company being delisted from the NASDAQ.Furthermore,scandals about “Enron financial fraud” and “The Sanlu milk powder incident” indicated that the phenomena of leader UPB are prevalent all over the world.However,many leaders still choose UPB to gain temporary benefits with a fluke mind that UPB may not be detected by external shareholders.Some leaders even think they have made a great contribution to the organization since they bring extra benefits in an unusual way.However,leader UPB may have repercussions within the organization as well.Given its unethical nature,leader UPB may also lead to negative responses from the internal members.Although a growing body of work enumerates the consequences of UPB,most research focused on employee UPB and explored its influence on subsequent employees’ emotions,cognitions,and behaviors.To date,little is known about the consequences of leader UPB.It is a crucial omission that leaders typically have more autonomy and resource to engage in UPB,and their behaviors have more impact on the organizations and society.Only two research studies in major journals revealed that leader UPB would increase employee UPB and unethical,self-serving behavior through modeling effects.This narrow focus limits understanding of the negative effects of leader UPB or explains why leader UPB pertains to outcomes of interests.Thus,numerous scholars have called for more research regarding the consequences of leader UPB and enrich its nomological networks through various theoretical perspectives.As a response,this research proposed two essential features of leader UPB based on the summarization and synthesis of UPB literature,defined as short-termism and moral looseness.On the one hand,leader UPB reflects short-termism since leader UPB aims to attain short-term benefits through unethical behavior,which may lead to negative consequences or even disaster in the long term.On the other hand,leader UPB reflects moral looseness,which refers to the adherence of moral norms are based on situation.Based on this argument,this research integrated the literature on leader UPB and creativity.Specifically,we conducted two studies investigating the relationship between leader UPB and employee and team creativity.In Study 1,we reveal the mechanisms of how the short-termism and moral looseness of leader UPB influence employee creativity.Drawing on social information processing theory,this research argues that employees will pay attention,encode,and interpret leader UPB since leader UPB is a counter-intuitive,negative,and paradoxical behavior.First,the short-termism feature of leader UPB may lead to employees’ short-term goal orientation,which negatively affects their creative process engagement and reduces employee creativity.Second,the moral looseness feature of leader UPB may lead to employees’ moral relativism,which is positively related to employee cognitive flexibility and enhance employee creativity.Moreover,we introduce employee incremental moral beliefs as key boundary conditions since employees who hold incremental moral beliefs pay more attention to the purpose of leader UPB.In contrast,employees with entity moral beliefs may view leader UPB as a signal of leaders’ unethical traits.This research recruited 305 participants via Credamo,an online survey platform.The results showed that leader UPB has a negative indirect effect on employee creativity through the chain mediating effect of short-term goal orientation and creative process engagement.Leader UBP has a positive indirect effect on employee creativity through the chain mediating effect of moral relativism and cognitive flexibility.Employee incremental moral beliefs enhance the relationship between leader UPB and employee moral relativism and have no moderating effect on the relationship between leader UPB and short-term goal orientation.In Study 2,this research explored how leader UPB influences team creativity.This research submits that leader UPB increases team short-term goal orientation as well,which undermines team learning and in turn reduces team creativity.Furthermore,this research also proposes that leader UPB may lead to team demoralization,which enhances team flexibility and increases team creativity.Drawing on social information process theory,this research introduced team work complexity as key situation boundary condition.In the complex work environment,team members are more inclined to pay attention to leader behaviors for obtaining task-related information,and they may show more acceptance of short-termism since focusing on short-term benefits bring certainty as well.Thus,this research argues that team task complexity enhances the positive relationship between leader UPB and team short-term goal orientation.Similarly,this research proposes that team work complexity strengthens the positive relationship between leader UPB and team demoralization.This research recruited 91 leaders and 391 employees from an on-site survey in two companies.The results showed that leader UPB has a negative indirect effect on team short-term goal orientation through the chain mediating effect of team shortterm goal orientation and team learning.However,since the effect of team demoralization on team flexibility was not significant,the indirect positive effect of leader UPB on team creativity was not significant.Task complexity has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between leader UPB and team short-term goal orientation,and has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between leader UPB and team demoralization.In sum,this reach makes three key contributions:(1)this research extended the outcome research of leader UPB by investigating the negative effect of leader UPB on team and employee creativity;(2)this reach revealed the mechanisms of how the short-termism and moral looseness feature of leader UPB influence employee creativity;(3)this research extended leader UPB research in a team level.Practically speaking,this research revealed that leader UPB has a distal negative effect on creativity in addition to moral-laden consequences.Leader UPB not only has harmful effects on the organizations in the moral domain,but such behavior may also reduce team and individual creativity,which deserves the attention of practitioners.Leader UPB embodies short-termism,which leads to team short-term goal orientation and reduces team members’ effort on reflection,knowledge acquisition,and integration,resulting in a low level of team creativity.In light of the vital role of team creativity in organizational innovation,leaders should reconsider the value of UPB and restrict UPB enactment. |
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