Millennial employees are increasingly paying more attention to well-being in the workplace and it has become an important issue for managers. Given that millennial employees are more sensitive to ethical issues, this study began by analyzing an ethical element in the organization—the ethical climate—and explored whether millennial employees have higher affective well-being in organizations with a good ethical climate. We verified our hypotheses based on 288 valid questionnaires collected from 40 teams. The results showed that: ethical climate was a positive (...) predictor of millennial employees’ organizational citizenship behavior and affective well-being, employees’ OCB partially mediated the relationship between ethical climate and affective well-being, and an employee’s moral identity effectively moderated the relationship between ethical climate and affective well-being, although it did not play a significant moderating role between ethical climate and OCB. These findings provide empirical support for applying situational strength and social information processing theories and emphasize the importance of cultivating an ethical climate in organizations. (shrink)

Over the past decade, ethical leadership has increasingly become one of the most popular topics in the areas of leadership and business ethics. As a result, there now exists a substantial body of empirical research addressing ethical leadership issues, but the findings reported by this body of research are highly fragmented. The topic has advanced to the stage where a review and synthesis of existing literature can provide great value and help move the scholarly conversation forward. The primary purposes of (...) this article are to review empirical findings from the ethical leadership literature utilizing a framework consisting of the antecedents, mediators, moderators and outcomes of ethical leadership, and suggest a set of interesting research opportunities, thereby facilitating future investigation. We base our synthesis on a review of 62 empirical studies on ethical leadership that were published between 2005 and mid-2015. (shrink)

This study extends earlier findings on ethical leadership by testing the relationship of the seven dimensions of ethical leadership with job satisfaction, organization commitment, job embeddedness, and cynicism. It uses time-lagged data from 585 employees in Pakistan. Using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, the study supports the concept of multidimensional ethical leadership in the Eastern setting and indicates that the dimensions of people orientation, fairness, power sharing, ethical guidance, and role clarification are associated with the majority of outcomes, (...) as suggested by social exchange theory. However, the concern for sustainability and integrity dimensions had a limited effect. (shrink)

Although a growing body of research has shown the positive impact of ethical leadership on workplace deviance, questions remain as to whether its benefits are consistent across all situations. In this investigation, we explore an important boundary condition of ethical leadership by exploring how employees’ moral awareness may lessen the need for ethical leadership. Drawing on substitutes for leadership theory, we suggest that when individuals already possess a heightened level of moral awareness, ethical leadership’s role in reducing deviant actions may (...) be reduced. However, when individuals lack this strong moral disposition, ethical leadership may be instrumental in inspiring them to reduce their deviant actions. To enhance the external validity and generalizability of our findings, the current research used two large field samples of working professionals in both Turkey and the USA. Results suggest that ethical leadership’s positive influence on workplace deviance is dependent upon the individual’s moral awareness—helpful for those employees whose moral awareness is low, but not high. Thus, our investigation helps to build theory around the contingencies of ethical leadership and the specific audience for whom it may be more influential. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.