The Double-Edged Effect Of Amoral Leadership And Its Producing Mechanism

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a prolonged global economic recession,with many companies closing down or struggling to survive.Unemployment is rising,income is falling,enterprises are facing unprecedented survival pressure and development challenges,leading managers to focus more on seizing economic benefits than ever before.Managers’ attention to performance and profit makes the leadership mode often ignore the ethical and moral issues in management,and amoral leadership is favored by many managers.Amoral leadership falls between moral leadership and unmoral leadership.It is a leader who consistently does not respond to subordinates’ ethical issues and demonstrates his or her support for ethical issues through communication,example setting,reward and punishment without words or actions.According to the literature,compared with the fruitful results achieved by the research on ethical leadership and unethical leadership,the academic circle’s attention to amoral leadership obviously lags behind the development of practice,which is not only reflected in the accumulation of little theory,but also very few empirical research.The only studies focus more on the "dark side" of amoral leadership,that is,it may make subordinates ignore the moral requirements in work and trigger their non-ethical behaviors.However,the speculation that this leadership style may improve management efficiency and have a positive effect on employees’ work performance has not been confirmed.Since amoral leadership is ubiquitous,it must have its positive side.It is necessary to explore its double-edged sword effect and corresponding intermediary mechanism,so as to avoid its negative effects and promote its positive effects better.As amoral leadership’s ethical stance is vague,it is difficult for subordinates to perceive the clear ethical attitude and expectation of the leader by adopting silence and inaction in the face of moral issues.But certain leadership situations can reinforce the clarity of this leadership style.Therefore,based on the theory of social information processing,this study places the amoral leadership in the specific leadership context of pay for performance,and introduced mental preoccupation with work and self-interest cognition as mediating variables from the perspective of instrumental cognition to explore the possible double-edged sword effect of amoral leadership on subordinates’ job performance and unethical behavior.During the research,we first combed the literature related to the study variables and put forward the research hypothesis and build the theoretical model on the basis of social information processing theory.Secondly,based on 330 questionnaire data of the two stages of leader-subordinate matching,we use SPSS26.0、AMOS22.0、PROCESS3.3 software to test these hypothesis,and the following findings are drawn:(1)Compared with low performance salary,high performance salary strengthens the positive effect of amoral leadership on subordinates’ mental preoccupation with work and further improves subordinates’ job performance;(2)High performance pay also strengthens the positive influence of amoral leadership on subordinates’ self-interest cognition and indirectly promotes their unethical behavior.Finally,we give the research conclusion and management enlightenment.As the performance pay system is widely implemented by enterprises,amoral leadership will promote employees’ commitment to work and their pursuit of self-interests,thus generating moral hazard while improving work performance.Organizational managers should strengthen moral leadership,attach importance to ethical norms in the leadership process.They should choose moral ways to lead subordinates and avoid blindly pursuing economic interests while ignoring social responsibilities.