Perceived Ethical Leadership And Subordinates' Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Unethical leadership may lead to the corruption of corporate ethics,while bringing inevitable disastrous consequences to corporates.Thus,scholars have paid more attention to “Ethical Leadership”.Past studies on the effects of ethical leadership remainly based on social learning theory.Social learning theory proposes that if leaders are perceived as attractive role models,their behaviors must express altruistic motives."Altruistic" is subordinates' attribution of leaders' behavioral motivation,but most of the research on ethical leadership has ignored the importance of subordinates' attribution preference.Therefore,this research integrates attribution theory and social learning theory,trying to deepen the understanding of how ethical leadership generates an effect.Based on the integration between social learning theory and attribution theory,this research is divided into two parts: First,through the review of the past researches,we found that the scale about the attribution of subordinate of the superior behavior does not meet our expectation.In study 1,we developed the construct of “subordinates' attributions of ethical leadership”,which is divided into attribution of intrinsic motive and extrinsic motive.In study 2,we explored how subordinates' attributions of ethical leadership interacted with ethical leadership in affecting subordinates' organizational citizenship behavior.Based on a sample of 278 employees,results showed that :(1)Subordinates' intrinsic attribution positively moderated the relationship between ethical leadership and subordinates' organizational citizenship behavior;(2)Subordinates' extrinsic attribution did not independently moderated the relationship between ethical leadership and subordinates' organizational citizenship behavior.(3)There was a significant three-way interaction between ethical leadership,subordinates' intrinsic attribution and subordinates' extrinsic attribution: when subordinates had high intrinsic attribution,high extrinsic attribution enhanced the positive relationship between ethical leadership and subordinates' organizational citizenship behavior;When subordinates had low intrinsic motivation attribution,high extrinsic attribution reduced the positive relationship between ethical leadership and subordinates' organizational citizenship behavior.The implications of this research are as follows: first,this research integrates attribution theory and social learning theory to understand the influence of ethical leadership,which broadens the influence mechanism of ethical leadership under the framework of social learning theory.Second,based on the Chinese context,this study developed and tested the scale of subordinates' attributions of ethical leadership,which provided a measuring tool for indigenous research.Thirdly,this research enriches research on subordinates' attribution by constructing the three-way interaction effect between ethical leadership,subordinates' intrinsic attribution and subordinates' extrinsic attribution.