How Does Organizational Politics Environment Influence Leader Justice Rule Adherence?

An unfortunate phenomenon is that leaders often violate justice rules,although they are aware of the importance of organizational justice.Therefore,scholars research the antecedents of leader justice rule adherence and find that some individual factors such as moral identity,moral development stage,and motives influence leader justice rule adherence.However,some researchers find that leaders with these characteristics and motives may still violate justice rules.It means that individual factors cannot fully explain leader justice rule adherence.In the present thesis,we shifted attention to situational factors by exploring how organizational politics,an unstudied but salient situational factor in modern workplace,influence leader justice rule adherence at within-person level and its boundary conditions.Based on self-depletion theory,we argue that leaders’ daily POP will increase self-depletion,because recognizing and dealing with organizational politics will expending self-regulation resources.Position tenure will weaken the positive relationship between POP and self-depletion with increasing knowledge and experiences of organizational politics.Furthermore,whether self-depletion leads to justice rule adherence depends on leaders regarding justice rule adherence as resource complement or resource depletion.We hypothesize that leader identity will moderate the relationship between self-depletion and justice rule adherence by shaping leaders" opinion of justice rule adherence.We collected data with a time-lagged interval-based experience sampling method.All participants are branch managers of a state-owned merchant bank in an eastern province of China.83 of all 110 branch managers agreed to participant the survey.They were first asked to complete a baseline survey about between-level variables such as position tenure and leader identity.After that,they participated daily surveys to rate within-person variables for ten consecutive workdays.Our final sample included 570 observations from 73 branch managers.We analyzed data using MSEM and found that at within-person level,leader POP positively related to self-depletion,and the relationship was moderated by leader position tenure so that it was significant only under low position tenure.Additionally,leader identity moderated the relationship between self-depletion and justice rule adherence so that the relationship was positive under high leader identity and negative under low.Furthermore,we found that after controlling individual characteristics and motives,POP had a positive indirect effect on justice rule adherence via self-depletion when position tenure was low and leader identity was high,and the indirect effect was negative when position tenure was low and leader identity was low.This thesis contributes to justice rule adherence,POP,and self-depletion literatures and theories:First,we go beyond the excessive emphasis on individual characteristics and motives of justice rule adherence in existing literature,and discusses an important of situational factors-organizational politics.Second,this thesis takes the lead in discussing the within-person variance of POP and its impact,responding to the call of existing literature to expand POP research into within-person level.Finally,we find that self-depletion may not only reduce but also increase justice rule adherence,depending on the leader’s self-definition.The above findings also have important marginal contributions to understanding the mechanism and boundary conditions of self-depletion theory.