Research On The Relationship Between Authentic Leadership And Employees' Unethical Behavior

In recent years, from government to enterprise, the reports about non-ethical behaviors, such as corruption, kickbacks, slacking, employee theft etc., emerge one after another, and some scholars have pointed out that, among the influence factors for non-ethical behavior of employees, the factor of leaders ranked the first, which was because the ethical values of the leaders have a direct impact on the workplace behavior of subordinates. As the needs for in response to the changing of social requirements and organizational leadership associated with it, more and more scholars have begun to focus on the authentic leadership. This paper will establish the relationship between the authentic leadership and non-ethical behavior of employees under the Chinese cultural background, to explore whether a certain relationship between the authentic leadership and non-ethical behavior of employees exists by the depth of factor levels; while specify the authentic leadership so as to make leaders examine themselves, to understand what is contrary to the authentic leadership, in order to improve the authenticity and validity, so as to effectively inhibit the non-ethical behavior of employees.Beginning with social exchange theory, the research model between authentic leadership, organizational justice and non-ethical behavior of employees is established, and the hypothesis is proposed based on the model. To test the correctness of the hypothesis, the mature scales at home and abroad are used, the employees are utilized as the research object, and 258 valid questionnaires are obtained by the means of online questionnaires in combination with paper questionnaires to obtain first-hand data. The reliability of scales are tested using SPSS software, and the overall situations of authentic leadership, organizational justice and non-ethical behavior of employees are analyzed respectively, and correlation analysis is used to discuss the effect intensity between authentic leadership, organizational justice and non-ethical behavior of employees, whose results show that significant correlation among the three presents. To further verify the directions among the variables, the multiple regression analysis is used to make the assumption in this paper confirmed, while the intermediary role of organizational justice is verified. The conclusions are as follows:(1) the authentic leadership and its dimensions have a negative impact on the non-ethical behavior of employees;(2) the authentic leadership and its dimensions have a positive impact on the organizational justice;(3) the organizational justice and its dimensions have a negative impact on the non-ethical behavior of employees;(4) the organizational justice and its dimensions play an intermediary role between the authentic leadership and the non-ethical behavior of employees partially.The main innovation of this paper are:(1) the few existing researches on the authentic leadership are more focused on some positive organizational consequences, and the researches on the relationship between the authentic leadership and the non-ethical behavior of employees are rare, even yes, just stay in the theory, this paper confirms that the authentic leadership has a negative impact on the non-ethical behavior of employees by empirical studies;(2) after that the authentic leadership has a negative impact on the non-ethical behavior of employees is clear, the intermediary role of the organizational justice between authentic leadership and non-ethical behavior of employees is explored and has been proven to improve the action mechanism between authentic leadership and non-ethical behavior of employees. Finally, according to the conclusions of this paper, some management advices for enterprise are proposed: pay attention to the leader's behavior, raise the level of authentic leadership; make efforts to create a fair organizational environment; focus on a variety of channels and reduce the non-ethical behavior of employees.