Ethical Leadership And Employee Unethical Behavior:The Mediating Role Of Distributive Justice And Employee Relational Energy

With the increasingly fierce competition in enterprises,some organizations and employees do not hesitate to adopt unethical behaviors to gain relative competitive advantages,which leads to a series of crises,such as enterprise scandals,business failures and so on.How to effectively prevent the unethical behavior of employees and explore the influencing factors of employees’ unethical behavior have become the focus of academic circles at home and abroad.The research shows that the main influencing factors of employees’ unethical behavior are organizational situation and individual psychology,but the mechanism of unethical behavior is still unclear.Some studies have proved that ethical leadership negatively affects employees’ unethical behavior,but the mechanism of ethical leadership influencing employees’ unethical behavior is rare.This paper will focus on the relationship and mechanism between ethical leadership and employees’ unethical behavior.To further explore,this study introduces two mediating variables,distributive justice and relational energy,as the mechanism to study the effect of ethical leadership on employees’ unethical behavior.In this paper,after summarizing the relevant literature,we put forward the relevant research hypotheses.Then through the method of field questionnaire survey at two time points,1 84 participants from different companies in China were investigated.Through data analysis,the proposed hypothesizes are verified and the following conclusions are drawn:Ethical leadership is positively correlated with distributive justice;Distributive justice is negatively correlated with employees’unethical behavior;Distributive justice plays a mediating role between ethical leadership and employee unethical behavior;Ethical leadership is positively correlated with employee relationship energy;Employee relationship energy is negatively correlated with employee unethical behavior;Employee relationship energy plays a mediating role between ethical leadership and employee unethical behavior.