research about ethical leaders

A New Model for Ethical Leadership

Create more value for society. by Max H. Bazerman

Summary .   

Rather than try to follow a set of simple rules (“Don’t lie.” “Don’t cheat.”), leaders and managers seeking to be more ethical should focus on creating the most value for society. This utilitarian view, Bazerman argues, blends philosophical thought with business school pragmatism and can inform a wide variety of managerial decisions in areas including hiring, negotiations, and even time management. Creating value requires that managers confront and overcome the cognitive barriers that prevent them from being as ethical as they would like to be. Just as we rely on System 1 (intuitive) and System 2 (deliberative) thinking, he says, we have parallel systems for ethical decision-making. He proposes strategies for engaging the deliberative one in order to make more-ethical choices. Managers who care about the value they create can influence others throughout the organization by means of the norms and decision-making environment they create.

Autonomous vehicles will soon take over the road. This new technology will save lives by reducing driver error, yet accidents will still happen. The cars’ computers will have to make difficult decisions: When a crash is unavoidable, should the car save its single occupant or five pedestrians? Should the car prioritize saving older people or younger people? What about a pregnant woman—should she count as two people? Automobile manufacturers need to reckon with such difficult questions in advance and program their cars to respond accordingly.

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4 Examples of Ethical Leadership in Business

• 14 Sep 2023

Have you ever faced an ethical dilemma? Maybe you found someone’s wallet on the ground or witnessed someone cheating during a test or competition. In these scenarios, the right answer isn’t always clear.

In business, you’re bound to encounter ethical dilemmas, especially as a leader. Behaving unethically can be illegal—for instance, stealing money or harming employees. In these situations, making the right choice is clearer. Sometimes, it’s not a question of legality but of weighing potential outcomes.

“Many of the decisions you face will not have a single right answer,” says Harvard Business School Professor Nien-hê Hsieh in the online course Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability . “Sometimes, the most viable answer may come with negative effects. In such cases, the decision is not black and white. As a result, many call them ‘gray-area decisions.’”

When facing ambiguity, how do you make the most ethical decision? Here’s a primer on ethical leadership and four examples of leaders who faced the same question.

Access your free e-book today.

What Is Ethical Leadership?

Ethical leadership is the practice of making decisions that balance stakeholders’ best interests with your company’s financial health, and empowering others to do the same.

As a leader, you have ethical responsibilities to four stakeholder groups—customers, employees, investors, and society—which Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability breaks down.

Responsibilities to Customers and Employees

• Well-being: What’s ultimately good for the person
• Rights: Entitlement to receive certain treatment
• Duties: A moral obligation to behave in a specific way
• Best practices: Aspirational standards not required by law or cultural norms

Employees have a fifth category—fairness—which comprises three types to consider:

• Legitimate expectations: Employees reasonably expect certain practices or behaviors to continue based on experiences with the organization and explicit promises.
• Procedural fairness: Managers must resolve issues impartially and consistently.
• Distributive fairness: Your company equitably allocates opportunities, benefits, and burdens.

Responsibilities to Investors

Your responsibilities to investors are known as fiduciary duties . The four types are:

• Duty of obedience: Adhere to corporate bylaws, superiors’ instructions, and the law.
• Duty of information: Disclose necessary information and remain truthful about performance and operations. Refuse to divulge certain information to nonessential parties.
• Duty of loyalty: Act in the most favorable way for shareholders and avoid conflicts of interest.
• Duty of care: Evaluate decisions’ potential outcomes before acting.

Responsibilities to Society

In addition to creating value for your business, you’re responsible for making a positive, or at least neutral, impact on society and the environment.

One framework to conceptualize this is the triple bottom line, also called the “three P’s”:

• Profit: Your business’s responsibility to make a profit.
• People: Your business’s responsibility to positively impact society by creating jobs, supporting charities, or promoting well-being initiatives.
• The planet: Your business’s responsibility to positively impact the natural environment, or at least not damage it.

Even business leaders with the best intentions can make unethical decisions. In a Harvard Business Review article , HBS Professor Max Bazerman describes the concept of motivated blindness , in which you become unaware of unethical decisions when they benefit you or your company.

Hsieh echoes this sentiment in Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability .

“Even when the right thing to do seems clear from an outsider’s perspective, factors like time, social pressures, and the need for self-preservation can complicate things,” Hsieh says in the course.

Learning about ethical leadership can enable you to be aware of unintended negligence and make more conscious, ethical decisions.

Here are four examples of business leaders who faced ethical dilemmas, how they handled them, and what you can learn from their experiences.

1. Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol Poisonings

A classic case of ethical leadership in business is “the Chicago Tylenol poisonings.” On September 9, 1982, a Chicago-area 12-year-old girl woke up with a cold. Her parents gave her a tablet of extra-strength Tylenol to ease her symptoms and, within hours, she died.

Six more deaths followed—the connecting factor between them was having taken extra-strength Tylenol shortly before passing away. It was later discovered that the tablets were laced with cyanide, a chemical that interferes with the body’s ability to use oxygen.

Johnson & Johnson, Tylenol’s parent company, had an ethical dilemma and a public relations disaster to contend with.

Baffled as to how the cyanide got in the tablets, Johnson & Johnson’s leaders acted quickly and pulled all Tylenol products off the shelves—31 million bottles worth over $100 million—and stopped all production and advertising.

The swiftness of their decision, although incredibly costly, put customers’ well-being at the forefront and saved lives.

Johnson & Johnson partnered with the Chicago Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to track down the perpetrator who added cyanide to the medication. The company offered a $100,000 reward and provided detailed updates on its investigation and product developments following the crisis.

When it became clear that the killer had bought the product, laced it with cyanide, and returned it to store shelves undetected, Johnson & Johnson developed the first-ever tamper-resistant packaging. The “safety seal” that now covers the opening of most food and drug products was born.

“Our highest responsibility has always been the health and safety of our consumers,” a Johnson & Johnson representative wrote in a statement to the Chicago Tribune . “While this tragic incident remains unsolved, this event resulted in important industry improvements to patient safety measures, including the creation of tamper-resistant packaging.”

The Tylenol brand recovered from the incident, largely because of Johnson & Johnson’s leadership team’s swift action and transparent care for customers.

2. JetBlue’s Shutdown

On Valentine’s Day, 2007 , at the John F. Kennedy International Airport, JetBlue Airlines sent nine planes from the gate to the runway during a snowstorm, hoping conditions would rapidly improve—but it had no such luck.

The misstep caused the planes to sit on the tarmac for more than five hours with disgruntled passengers inside. The issue snowballed from there.

Since JetBlue employees had to work overtime to deal with the delays, few had enough allowable flight time to handle upcoming departures. JetBlue was left with no choice but to cancel 1,096 flights over the following five days.

CEO David Neeleman responded by writing an apology letter to customers and crafting a “ customer bill of rights ” that the airline still abides by. The document outlined customers’ rights to information about flights, as well as how they’d be compensated in the event of delays or cancellations.

Neeleman also went on a public apology tour, taking full responsibility for the incident rather than blaming it on the weather.

This response stands in contrast to the 2022 Southwest Airlines incident that played out similarly but with less accountability from leaders. Initially caused by bad weather and then exacerbated by Southwest’s outdated booking systems, the 16,700 canceled flights left thousands stranded between December 21 and 31.

In contrast to Neeleman’s apologies and emphasis on customer rights, Southwest CEO Bob Jordan took a defensive stance, explaining in a video the impact that “record bitter cold” had on all airlines and that Southwest was doing everything it could to remedy the issue. While those points may have been true, the response didn’t go over well with customers who wanted to feel respected and understood.

Each leader's choices highlight the importance of being transparent and championing customer rights when facing similar issues.

Related: The Importance of Reflective Leadership in Business

3. Starbucks’s Racial Bias Incident

If one of your employees made a critical decision based on racial bias, how would you respond? That was the question Kevin Johnson, then-CEO of coffee shop chain Starbucks, had to answer in April 2014 .

One day, two Black men entered a Starbucks in Philadelphia and asked to use the bathroom. The manager on duty told them the restroom was for paying customers only, so they sat down to wait for their friend to arrive before ordering.

The manager called the police, who arrested the men for trespassing. Although no charges were filed, the arrest went viral and sparked protests throughout the United States.

Starbucks, which prides itself on being an ethical brand , has one of the most diverse leadership groups in corporate America—five of the board’s 14 members are women, and five are from racial minority groups. This racially motivated incident clashed with its values.

Johnson fired the manager who called for the arrest, apologized to the two men, and announced racial bias training for all Starbucks employees.

To emphasize the training’s importance, Johnson closed 8,000 locations on May 29, 2018, to educate 175,000 employees. This cost Starbucks an estimated $12 million in lost profit but spread the message that it cares about its customers, employees, and society.

Related: How to Create a Culture of Ethics and Accountability in the Workplace

4. The Muse Sticking Up for Employees

Ethical dilemmas often aren’t public scandals—even quiet, internal decisions can have enormous impacts. Kathryn Minshew, CEO and co-founder of The Muse , faced one such scenario in the early days of growing the online career platform.

She’d just signed a company to use The Muse’s recruiting platform. It was a major deal, and the young startup desperately needed revenue. But during the onboarding process, Minshew noticed the client’s representatives were talking down to her junior staff members. While they respected her, how they treated her team didn’t sit well.

She spoke with the client about it, effectively providing a warning and a chance to start the relationship on a better note. Still, the poor treatment of her team continued.

Minshew had a decision to make: Take the revenue despite the mistreatment or part ways with the client to support her team. She went with the latter.

“I told them nicely that it didn’t make sense to work together anymore and refunded the unused balance of their money,” Minshew says in an interview with Fast Company . “They tried to argue, but at that point, my mind was made up. I didn’t realize how relieved my team was—and how much they appreciated it—until after it was all done.”

By cutting ties with the client, Minshew fulfilled her ethical responsibility to create an environment that supported her employees’ well-being and right to be treated respectfully. In doing so, she built a strong foundation of trust and demonstrated that she’d have their best interest in mind—even at the business’s expense.

“I think backing your team in situations like that is really important,” Minshew says in the same interview, “but it’s not always easy, especially when you’re early-stage.”

How to Develop Ethical Leadership Skills

While these scenarios likely differ from those you face at your organization, ethical leadership’s guiding principles ring true.

To build your ethical leadership skills , consider taking an online business ethics course. In Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability , Hsieh presents several real-world examples of ethical dilemmas, prompts you to consider how you’d respond to them, and then lets business leaders share how they handled each.

In the course, you also learn how to use frameworks and tools to conceptualize your responsibilities to stakeholders, make judgment calls in gray-area situations, and act decisively to reach optimal outcomes.

By learning from the challenges and triumphs of those who came before you, you can equip yourself to handle any ethical dilemmas that come your way.

Are you interested in learning how to navigate difficult decisions as a leader? Explore Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability —one of our online leadership and management courses —and download our free guide to becoming a more effective leader.

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Article contents

Ethical leadership.

• Suzanne van Gils Suzanne van Gils BI Norwegian Business School
• , and  Niels van Quaquebeke Niels van Quaquebeke Kühne Logistics University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.558
• Published online: 15 September 2022

Business scandals in the early 2000s gave renewed rise to the question of how companies can be led ethically. Correspondingly, research on ethical leadership focuses on leaders as moral persons—but even more so as moral managers. This focus came with a more general shift within many Western societies toward issues of sustainability, social justice, and well-being, and it has simultaneously given rise to the development of related constructs such as servant, respectful, and authentic leadership. In general, ethical leadership research has contributed to a necessary debate about leaders’ roles and responsibilities. Nonetheless, recent meta-analyses and critical reviews have criticized the minimal to nonexistent incremental value of the current operationalization of ethical leadership beyond other leadership concepts, underscored the philosophically all too simplistic notion of ethics underlying the concept, and highlighted its construct redundancy with the domain of follower-focused leadership. As such, there appear to be fruitful avenues for further honing the construct and its operationalization so that research can meaningfully inform leadership practice.

• ethical leadership
• moral management
• moral identity
• leadership scales
• counterproductive work behavior

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What is Ethical Leadership and Why is it Important?

Ethical leadership is not only the right thing to do, it is key to driving an organization's success.

Valerie Kirk

Errors, bad behavior, and poor judgment in leadership can negatively impact a company’s brand and reputation. For business success, it’s critical for organizations to fill their C-suite with ethical leaders.

Ethical leadership involves leaders and managers making decisions based on the right thing to do for the common good, not just based on what is best for themselves or for the bottom line. While profits are important, ethical leaders take into consideration the needs of customers, communities, and employees in addition to company growth and revenue when making business decisions. 

Ethical leaders encourage their team members to model this behavior, too. They help to build a workplace culture that values transparency, collaboration and inclusion, and where everyone feels safe to share their voice.

They can also help organizations recruit and retain top talent. Professionals are increasingly seeking out companies whose leaders strive to do the right thing. Generation Z, who will make up 25 percent of the workforce by 2025, demands leadership ethics more than generations that came before them. 

“Gen Z is not going to negotiate. They have really strong values and ethics, and they don’t bend them because of intimidation or because they are just getting a paycheck,” said Michael McCarthy, instructor at Harvard Division of Continuing Education’s Professional & Executive Development and host of the “ Happy at Work ” podcast. “The idea of letting harmful or hurtful behavior slide is not acceptable.”

Leaders who weigh ethical considerations before making key business decisions drive a company’s long-term success. 

The 6 Main Principles of Ethical Leadership

Having ethical leaders isn’t as simple as hiring “good” people. Companies should strive to fill their leadership ranks with people who embody the principles of ethical leadership. The six main principles include: 

Respect includes valuing others’ skills and contributions. While historically respect in the workplace may have been one-way (leaders demanding respect from employees), in an ethical work environment, respect is mutual. 

Mutual respect leads to healthier workplace relationships where both sides appreciate and support what the other is doing and feel secure in talking through issues and challenges. Healthy relationships create positive work environments, which drives increased productivity.

Current and upcoming business leaders should take mutual respect into account as workforce expectations continue to shift.  

“I tell current leadership to respect Gen Z. They have values and morals, and you’re going to have a better organization because of them,” McCarthy said. “They aren’t going to put up with the old hierarchy that doesn’t offer mutual respect.” 

2. Accountability

Ethical leaders hold themselves accountable for their actions. They make decisions based on integrity and stand behind their work. They also lead by example, communicate openly about challenges, and don’t look to place blame on others for any shortfalls.

Leaders make ethical decisions based on doing what is right for employees, customers, and the community. Because these constituents are always top of mind for ethical leaders, they often have a strong sense of service. They engage in activities such as charitable giving and volunteer work to give  back to their communities — and encourage their teams to do the same. 

Leaders who are transparent build trust amongst their organizations and amongst customers. 

To build and maintain trust, leaders must be good communicators who speak openly and honestly about issues. Regardless of the issue’s severity or unpopularity, leaders’ responsibility to be clear and candid  empowers others to make the right decisions with the information they have. 

Honesty and transparency also help to build a brand’s reputation, leading to long-term customer loyalty.

Justice is not just about following the law, but about ensuring that everyone is getting what they deserve. Ethical leaders approach situations with a focus on treating everyone fairly, and they expect their teams to treat each other and customers the same way. Through their actions, they build equitable work environments where everyone feels respected. 

6. Community

Ethical leaders view their companies as communities and consider everyone involved when evaluating situations and making decisions. By viewing their organizations this way, they build equity and inclusion into their decision-making process and create work environments that encourage collaboration across teams. 

Learn more about Harvard DCE’s Ethical Leadership program

Examples of Positive and Negative Ethical Leadership

The following three examples are of companies that were faced with ethical dilemmas and how different leadership styles led to vastly different outcomes. 

Johnson & Johnson

One of the most famous examples of ethical leadership was the case of the Tylenol cyanide poisonings in the early 1980s. Seven people died of cyanide poisoning, and the only connecting factor was that they had all taken extra-strength Tylenol. During investigation, it was discovered that the tablets were laced with cyanide.

Johnson & Johnson’s leaders acted quickly and pulled all Tylenol products off the shelves — 31 million bottles, worth over $100 million — and stopped all production and advertising. The swiftness of their decision, although costly, put customers’ well-being first and saved lives.

They partnered with law enforcement to find the perpetrator and subsequently developed the first-ever tamper-resistant packaging. They were transparent with the public about what they were doing to ensure this tragedy never happened again. 

The Tylenol brand recovered from the incident, largely because of Johnson & Johnson’s ethical leadership team’s swift action and transparent care for customers.

In 2008, JetBlue left passengers stranded on the tarmac at the John F. Kennedy International Airport for more than five hours during a snowstorm. The delay had a ripple effect — JetBlue had to cancel more than 1,000 flights over the following five days.

In response, JetBlue’s CEO wrote a letter of apology to customers. He also directed his team to draft a customer bill of rights, which outlined customers’ rights to information about flights and information about compensation in the event of delays or cancellations.

The CEO also participated in a public apology tour, taking full responsibility for the incident rather than blaming it on the weather.

His transparency and accountability created trust with customers, who stayed loyal to the airline.

Wells Fargo

In September 2016 , it was revealed that employees of Wells Fargo, one of the largest banks in the United States, opened millions of unauthorized accounts in order to meet aggressive sales targets. This widespread fraudulent activity was the result of a work culture that prioritized quantity over quality and pushed employees to engage in unethical practices.

Company leaders denied knowledge of fraudulent practices. The bank was hit with significant financial penalties, but because of the lack of accountability, they damaged the trust of their customers and investors. They reported a 50 percent profit loss in the quarter following the scandal.

Meeting the Ethical Challenges of Leadership

Companies cannot underestimate the power of different leadership styles on their growth and long term success. Those who practice ethical leadership have positive corporate cultures where employees are engaged, motivated, and feel good about coming to work. Companies without ethical leadership face lower productivity and high turnover rates, impacting the organization’s bottom line.

Ethical leaders aren’t just born with these skills — they develop them over years of experience and training. 

Harvard DCE Professional & Executive Development offers a two-day Ethical Leadership program that helps leaders develop skills to make ethical choices and lead companies through challenging dilemmas. 

Topics covered include: 

• Making ethical decisions with conflicting responsibilities 
• Building a moral framework within yourself and the organization
• Understanding the role of employees in both their professional and personal lives 
• Navigating a slippery slope when seemingly good people do bad things
• Building a corporate culture that values moral behavior

Learn more about the ethical leadership program, including how to register.  

Leaders looking to expand their ethical leadership skills should also consider the two-day Authentic Leadership program , where they will learn how to develop mindfulness and authenticity to build trust, create engagement, and promote productivity. 

Explore all Executive Leadership and Management courses

About the Author

Valerie Kirk is a freelance writer and corporate storyteller specializing in customer and community outreach and topics and trends in education, technology, and healthcare. Based in Maryland near the Chesapeake Bay, she spends her free time exploring nature by bike, paddle board, or on long hikes with her family.

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Unethical Leadership: Review, Synthesis and Directions for Future Research

• Original Paper
• Open access
• Published: 18 March 2022
• Volume 183 , pages 511–550, ( 2023 )

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• Sharfa Hassan   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2828-4212 1 ,
• Puneet Kaur 2 , 3 ,
• Michael Muchiri   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6816-8350 4 ,
• Chidiebere Ogbonnaya 5 &
• Amandeep Dhir 3 , 6 , 7  

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The academic literature on unethical leadership is witnessing an upward trend, perhaps given the magnitude of unethical conduct in organisations, which is manifested in increasing corporate fraud and scandals in the contemporary business landscape. Despite a recent increase, scholarly interest in this area has, by and large, remained scant due to the proliferation of concepts that are often and mistakenly considered interchangeable. Nevertheless, scholarly investigation in this field of inquiry has picked up the pace, which warrants a critical appraisal of the extant research on unethical leadership. To this end, the current study systematically reviews the existing body of work on unethical leadership and offers a robust and multi-level understanding of the academic developments in this field. We organised the studies according to various themes focused on antecedents, outcomes and boundary conditions. In addition, we advance a multi-level conceptualisation of unethical leadership, which incorporates macro, meso and micro perspectives and, thus, provide a nuanced understanding of this phenomenon. The study also explicates critical knowledge gaps in the literature that could broaden the horizon of unethical leadership research. On the basis of these knowledge gaps, we develop potential research models that are well grounded in theory and capture the genesis of unethical leadership under our multi-level framework. Scholars and practitioners will find this study useful in understanding the occurrence, consequences and potential strategies to circumvent the negative effects of unethical leadership.

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Introduction

The contemporary business landscape is witnessing staggering levels of unethical conduct that has strikingly surfaced at the bottom-line figures with estimated total losses worth US$42 billion reported by PwC's Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey ( 2020 ). Interestingly, the contributions of top management in various unethical practices account for over 26% which includes some of the costliest instances of fraud producing not only financial impacts for organisations but also emotional and psychological impacts for their stakeholders (PwC, 2020 ). While sufficient evidence also indicates that top management exhibits serious concerns for business integrity in terms of complying with rules and regulations, behaving responsibly towards various stakeholder groups and maintaining high moral standards (Earnest &Young, 2020 ), the trajectory of corporate scandals continues to increase at a more rapid rate than ever before (Mishra et al., 2021 ), and reciprocal dynamism is witnessed among ‘bad apples’ and ‘bad barrels’(Cialdini et al., 2021 ). Accordingly, corporate leaders, along with the cultures they foster within organisations, work in a vicious cycle wherein one reinforces the other to establish a breeding ground for profound and severe unethical practices. Unsurprisingly, therefore, more than 50% of companies globally experience a minimum of six fraud incidents per year, with another 50% not reporting or investigating the worst incidents (PwC, 2020 ). Hence, unethical leadership is at the intersection of immoral, illegal leadership practices and the unethical climate that further strengthens such leadership. Whether bad apples promote bad barrels or bad barrels host bad apples, the contemporary line of discourse in leadership is increasingly realising the consequential nature of unethical leadership.

Unethical leadership is conceptualised as leader behaviours and decisions that are not only anti-moral but most often illegal and exhibit an outrageous intent to instigate unethical behaviours among followers (Brown & Mitchell, 2010 ). Unethical leadership has long been documented to cause a deleterious impact on organisations. For example, the famous emissions scandal of Volkswagen, known as ‘Dieselgate’, cost the company an estimated US$63 billion (Jung & Sharon, 2019 ). The consequences of this scandal resulted from an interplay of unethical leaders and an unethical organisational culture (Javaid et al., 2020 ). Similar evidence has been reported in another famous case involving Enron, where an unethical climate fostered conscious rule breaking within the organisation, which resulted in both reputational and financial consequences (Sims & Brinkmann, 2003 ). This scenario has been accentuated by the growing reporting of corporate misconduct in the mainstream media (Chen, 2010a ), which has heightened the interest of scholars in this direction.

Research into unethical leadership has largely focused on the aftermath that accompanies organisation leaders’ morally inappropriate and legally unacceptable behaviours that are directed towards the organisation and followers (Javaid et al., 2020 ). Scholars have gauged the impact of unethical leadership in the domains of employee attitudes, e.g. intentions to stay (Ruiz-Palomino et al., 2021 ) and intentions to engage in fraudulent acts (Johnson et al., 2017 ), and employee behaviours, e.g. counterproductive work behaviours (Knoll et al., 2017 ), crimes of obedience (Carsten & Uhl-Bien, 2013 ) and knowledge hiding (Qin et al., 2021 ), among others. Recently, scholars have begun to investigate the team- or group-level ( b ; Cialdini et al., 2021 ; Peng, Schaubroeck, et al., 2019 ) and organisational-level consequences (Mujkic & Klingner, 2019 ; Sherif et al., 2016 ; Vasconcelos, 2015 ) of this phenomenon; however, such investigations remain scant.

An important trend in recent years is the interchangeable use of various measures, conceptualisations and terminologies, which has, by and large, confused the research space on unethical leadership. In fact, concepts such as destructive leadership and its offshoot abusive supervision have dominated this area (Mackey et al., 2021 ), and research pertaining solely to unethical leadership has received extremely limited attention. Given the rampant proliferation of measures and concepts, both the empirical and conceptual distinctiveness of unethical leadership has been blurred (Ünal et al., 2012 ). Furthermore, a dispute over the distinction between unethical and ethical leadership has distorted the conceptual underpinnings of both concepts. Some scholars treat unethical leadership as the flipside of ethical leadership and equate the absence of exemplary leader behaviours with the presence of unethical leadership. However, others have challenged this notion, asserting a quantitative distinction between unethical and ethical leadership styles, which requires separate lines of academic inquiry (Gan et al., 2019 ). Ünal et al. ( 2012 ) captured this view, demonstrating that a single occurrence of dysfunctional leader behaviour does not amount to unethical leadership.

Despite the consequential and distinctive nature of unethical leadership, scholars have made few attempts to systematically organise the literary work in this field and thereby facilitate a comprehensive understanding of unethical leadership from an academic perspective. One of the earliest scholarly investigations in this regard is that of Brown and Mitchell ( 2010 ), who synthesised the academic literature on unethical leadership under the framework of ethical leadership. Their article had an overt focus on ethical leadership within organisations, which they supplemented with unethical perspectives on leadership to broaden the study’s scope. Our review is not only exclusively geared towards unethical leadership but also distinguishes unethical leadership from the absence of ethical behaviours. Furthermore, the early work on unethical leadership does not provide a comprehensive account of the developments in the area, perhaps because this line of literature, as a separate research area, has developed only in the recent past. Thus, we believe that the significant body of research conducted on unethical leadership since Brown and Mitchell’s ( 2010 ) review study needs to be synthesised. Furthermore, Lašáková and Remišová ( 2015 ) enhanced theoretical understanding of unethical leadership by delineating problems in its existing conceptualisations. While their study broadened the concept’s definitional space, it did not account for the extant empirical work in the area. Our study not only distinguishes unethical leadership from related concepts but also provides a detailed view of the empirical work in the area and offers new practical insights into the field.

Apart from the above-discussed rationale, we contend that unethical leadership remains the least researched concept among its academic offshoots. In fact, scholars have thoroughly investigated concepts such as abusive supervision and destructive leadership via both empirical studies and a good number of systematic literature reviews (SLRs) and meta-analyses (Mackey et al., 2017 , 2021 ; Schyns & Schilling, 2013 ; Zhang & Bednall, 2016 ). This points towards the need to examine the extant unethical leadership studies in their own right without confusing them with studies that focus on any of these related concepts. Furthermore, existing SLRs are either too specific or too general and, thus, provide few insights into the area of unethical leadership. For example, studies pertaining exclusively to abusive supervision highlight the verbal and non-verbal abuse leaders direct towards their followers, but these studies offer only a limited understanding of other unethical behaviours, e.g. violations of rules or norms. In the same manner, studies pertaining to destructive leadership examine myriad behaviours that further add to the problematic proliferation of concepts in this research domain (Mackey et al., 2021 ).This underscores an urgent need to re-examine the concept of unethical leadership and the associated literature and thereby facilitate a robust understanding of unethical leadership as a distinct concept.

The current study’s overarching aim is, thus, to conduct an SLR of the extant literature and thereby not only help to synthesise this literature but also identify new issues and broaden the horizon of research in that area by highlighting important knowledge gaps in the existing body of work. Consistent with the above discussion, the present study seeks to address the following research questions (RQs): RQ1 What is the research profile of the relevant extant literature published on unethical leadership? RQ2 What are the dominant focus areas and themes on which most of the academic inquiry has concentrated? RQ3 What are the important knowledge gaps in the existing body of research and potential future research areas that must be investigated to enrich the field?

To address the above research queries, we first extracted the most relevant data with the aid of a robust SLR protocol that has already been validated in a number of studies (Kaur et al., 2021 ; Khan et al., 2021 ; Seth et al., 2020 ; Talwar et al., 2020 ). For RQ1 , we generated the descriptive statistics for the existing research by establishing precise inclusion and exclusion criteria and listing the keywords to search in the most reliable databases. To address RQ2 , we organised all of the shortlisted studies around themes derived from the results of our content analysis. For RQ3 , we identified research gaps and corresponding research questions specific to each emergent theme. To further complement the identified gaps, we developed a multi-level framework of unethical leadership—titled the ‘M3 framework’. Furthermore, we proposed seven potential research models for scholars and practitioners interested in studying unethical leadership. The proposed framework and potential models will be useful for delineating the specific variable relationships scholars can examine in greater detail and from various theoretical lenses to facilitate both conceptual and empirical work in this area. Therefore, these models aim to capture some of the lacunae in the literature.

This SLR is organised into the following sections. In Sect. 2, we examine the conceptual understanding of unethical leadership and make some important distinctions between unethical leadership and other concepts. Section 3, which is devoted to the methodology, explicates the exact protocol we followed to identify the relevant corpus of studies. In this section, we discuss both the data extraction process and the research profile of the sampled studies. In Sect. 4, we discuss the themes that emerged in the coding process as well as the knowledge gaps and potential research questions pertaining to each theme. In Sect. 5, we propose and discuss the conceptual framework and seven potential research models based on gaps identified in Sect. 4. Section 6 provides the practical and theoretical implications of the current study, while Sect. 7 concludes the study by acknowledging its limitations.

Conceptualising Unethical Leadership

Defining unethical leadership.

Contemporary discourse on unethical leadership remains relatively sparse, with only a few studies extensively focused on crystallising the conceptual underpinnings of this leadership type. Brown and Mitchell ( 2010 ) laid the early foundations by offering definitional and conceptual reflections on the phenomenon. They defined unethical leadership ‘ as behaviours conducted and decisions made by organisational leaders that are illegal and/or violate moral standards and those that impose processes and structures that promote unethical conduct by followers ’ (Brown & Mitchell, 2010 , p. 588). The essential tenet of this definition pertains to the leader behaviours that instil unethical conduct in followers. Under this definition, therefore, unethical leadership amounts not only to leaders themselves engaging in unethical behaviours but also enabling and harnessing unethical follower behaviours. Leaders perform these efforts either by overtly demonstrating unethical conduct or passively promoting an unethical climate by ignoring unethical conduct and, thus, allowing unethical behaviours to flourish within organisations (Brown et al., 2005 ).The potential drawback of this definition, however, is its failure to explicitly identify the exact behaviours that could be labelled as unethical. Because morality is a diverse and culturally ingrained phenomenon, the manifestations of unethical behaviours are likewise diverse, which renders unethical leadership a rather relative concept (Resick et al., 2011 ).

To address some of these pitfalls, Ünal et al., ( 2012 ) conducted a seminal study to develop a more robust and comprehensive understanding of unethical leadership. They discussed unethical leadership from normative perspectives and advanced a deeper understanding of the concept by differentiating it from similar leadership styles as well as from the lack of exemplary ethical leader behaviours. Specifically, they defined unethical leadership/supervision as ‘ supervisory behaviours that violate normative standards ’(Ünal et al., 2012 , p.6). Their distinction between unethical leadership and other related concepts, along with the description of precise unethical leadership practices, offers nuanced insights into this research area. In particular, they utilised virtue ethics, deontology, teleology and utilitarian perspectives to develop normative foundations of unethical leadership practices. They identified the violation of employee rights, unfair justice mechanisms, violation of legitimate organisational interests and weak leader character as potential manifestations of unethical leadership. Subsequent research has captured these manifestations of unethical leader behaviour in various cultural contexts. For example, Eisenbeiß and Brodbeck ( 2014 ) examined cross-cultural and cross-sectoral similarities in unethical leadership perceptions. Their comparative research highlighted the interplay of compliance-oriented and value-oriented perspectives within the domain of unethical leadership, and they identified dishonesty, unfair treatment, irresponsible behaviour, non-adherence to rules, laws and regulations, engagement in corruption and other criminal behaviours, an egocentric orientation, manipulative tendencies and a lack of empathy towards followers as the common manifestations of unethical behaviour in various countries.

The above discussion highlights the efforts made, thus, far to clarify what unethical leadership is and what it is not and to define it as a distinct concept rather than merely the opposite of ethical leadership (Ünal et al., 2012 ). With research on unethical leadership taking a new direction and scholars investigating distinct yet related concepts more frequently than unethical leadership itself, however, it becomes crucial to highlight unethical leadership as a separate line of inquiry that requires equal attention. In the sections that follow, we discuss some of these concepts and reveal the differences between them and the concept of unethical leadership.

Unethical Leadership and Related Concepts

The domain of unethical leadership has witnessed an increasing proliferation of concepts, which has seriously obstructed the meaningful application of findings to unethical leadership research and practice (Tepper & Henle, 2011 ; Ünal et al., 2012 ). For example, scholars have employed concepts including petty tyranny (Ashforth, 1997 ), supervisor undermining (Duffy et al., 2002 ), workplace aggression (Neuman & Baron, 1998 ), despotic leadership (De Hoogh & Den Hartog, 2008 ), abusive supervision (Tepper, 2000 ), destructive leadership (Einarsen et al., 2007 ) and some newer forms, e.g. Machiavellian leadership (Belschak et al., 2018 ), interchangeably. In fact, concepts such as abusive supervision and destructive leadership have received the most scholarly attention and have developed into separate lines of academic inquiry. It is important to mention here that destructive leadership and abusive supervision have been highly influential in the academic literature (Mackey et al., 2021 ), and the remainder of the concepts mentioned above fall under the domain of these two leadership types. Hence, we discuss these two concepts and attempt to differentiate them from unethical leadership. Furthermore, we advance the conceptual distinction between unethical leadership and the absence of ethical leadership/the lack of exemplary ethical behaviours. Figure  1 presents a conceptual overview of the differences between unethical leadership and other forms of leadership styles. Before discussing these, we provide a brief conceptual understanding of unethical leadership and the lack of ethical behaviours.

Overview of conceptual differences between unethical leadership and other forms of leadership styles

Unethical Leadership vs Lack of Ethical Leadership

The dominant discussions on ethical and unethical leadership have recently shifted towards viewing ethical and unethical leadership as distinct concepts that require their own investigation (Gan et al., 2019 ). These concepts are increasingly recognised as quantitatively distinct, with scholars acknowledging that the absence of ethical behaviour does not necessarily amount to unethical leadership (Ünal et al., 2012 ). While ethical leadership is ‘ the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships’ (Brown et al., 2005 , p. 120), unethical leadership, as discussed above, incorporates behaviours and decisions that could be illegal or morally unsound (Brown & Mitchell, 2010 ). This suggests that the mechanism that explains the formation of unethical leadership and its consequences is distinct from that of ethical leadership (Gan et al., 2019 ). Therefore, a single instance of dysfunctional leader behaviour does not always equate to unethical leadership (Ünal et al., 2012 ). This understanding has implications for the concept’s operationalisation because simply reverse coding the scale items would fail to accurately reflect an unethical leader’s behaviour. Hence, the present study incorporates research that has explicitly studied unethical leadership. In mining the literature, we specifically sought studies that were focused on unethical leadership and not those where the major theme was the absence of exemplary leader behaviours or ethical failures.

Unethical Leadership vs Destructive Leadership

Destructive leadership is defined as ‘ a process in which over a longer period of time the activities, experiences and/or relationships of an individual or the members of a group are repeatedly influenced by their supervisor in a way that is perceived as hostile and/or obstructive ’ (Schyns & Schilling, 2013 , p. 141) While an overlap appears to exist between unethical and destructive leadership, a fine line separates these concepts. Destructive leadership essentially captures harmful methods of influence directed at followers (Mackey et al., 2021 ), and it includes myriad leader behaviours, such as punishment, leader incivility, leader undermining, leader atrocities, toxic behaviours etc. We argue that although both concepts share the dimension of immorality, unethical leadership also includes behaviours that can be compliance based (Eisenbeiß & Brodbeck, 2014 ). In other words, unethical leadership can also entail behaviours that are illegal and amount to regulatory violations (Javaid et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, we argue that some types of destructive leader behaviours—e.g. tyrannical and insular leadership—can be pro-organisational. While such leadership types override follower interests, leaders pursue them under the guise of organisational interests (Einarsen et al., 2007 ).

In fact, pseudo-transformational leadership, yet another form of destructive leadership, has the potential to yield positive organisational outcomes (Almeida et al., 2021 ). In contrast, unethical leadership includes behaviours that are undeniably illegal and, at the same time, violate moral standards, thus, granting no benefit of the doubt to the intentionality of the leader’s behaviour. It can, thus, be inferred that destructive leadership and its various types employ ‘harmful methods of follower influence’, where the intentionality of such behaviour is subject to interpretation. While unethical leadership may not employ harmful methods of punishment, oppression or committing atrocities, it may reflect in corporate scandals and financial misreporting, among others. Finally, destructive leadership, which essentially includes behaviours that are hostile and obstructive, can originate from other types of leadership that need not be unethical. Even positive leadership types, e.g. ethical leadership, can instigate hostile behaviours with the presence of a curvilinear relationship between ethical leadership and positive employee outcomes (Stouten et al., 2013 ).

Unethical Leadership vs Abusive Supervision

Another leading concept in this direction is abusive supervision, which scholars have, at times, categorised under destructive leadership. Abusive supervision is defined as ‘subordinates' perceptions of the extent to which supervisors engage in the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviours, excluding physical contact ’ (Tepper, 2000 , p. 178). Under this definition, abusive supervision, like destructive leadership, encompasses longitudinal hostile behaviours, but these are limited solely to verbal and non-verbal abuse (i.e. these behaviours exclude physical abuse; Zhang & Bednall, 2016 ). Once again, however, scholars have not explicated the direction of outcomes in the context of abusive supervision, making it a typical category of destructive leadership (Guo et al., 2020 ).

The target of the intended behaviour is another critical point of distinction not only for delineating the scope but also the research framework of the present study. Under abusive supervision, leaders’ demeaning language and derogatory remarks are directed solely at their followers (Tepper, 2000 ). Under unethical leadership, however, different forms of unethical leader behaviours can target both followers and organisations. This confirms the view that abusive supervision is highly psychological in nature, encompassing high-intensity hostile behaviours that are directed at people (Almeida et al., 2021 ). The preceding discussion, however, suggests that unethical leadership need not be highly intense or hostile. Rather, it can entail passive and more subtle as well as legally unacceptable behaviours. This means that unethical leadership, unlike abusive supervision, can be task-oriented. Therefore, corporate scandals and financial misreporting fall under the concept of unethical leadership, and abusive supervision is, thus, conceptually distinct from unethical leadership. Furthermore, abusive supervision entails micro-level interactions between a leader and his or her immediate followers. In contrast, unethical leadership can operate at many levels and is much broader than these interactions between the leader and his or her followers.

The remaining concepts enumerated above, including petty tyranny, supervisor undermining, workplace aggression, despotic leadership, corrupt leadership, evil leadership and derailed leadership, likewise fall under the framework of destructive leadership with minor differences based on intentionality, types of behaviour, perceived versus actual behaviour, the inclusion of outcomes and the persistence of behaviours (Schyns & Schilling, 2013 ; Ünal et al., 2012 ). For example, workplace aggression is a type of destructive leadership wherein leaders direct hostile physical behaviours—e.g. pushing, hitting etc.—towards their followers (Neuman & Baron, 1998 ). Similarly, individuals who exercise Machiavellian leadership do not exhibit persistent hostile behaviours but rather intermittent and situational hostile behaviours towards followers (Belschak et al., 2018 ). It is important to mention here that although these conceptual differences have been delineated, the operational measurement of these concepts is not mutually exclusive, which often renders them interchangeable (Ünal et al., 2012 ). However, the current study treats them as separate concepts and includes only those studies that have examined unethical leadership in its own right without reference to any of these overlapping concepts.

The aim of the present study is to systematically review the extant literature on unethical leadership. Systematic reviews are considered scientific and enable the researcher to identify and critically analyse relevant research in a particular domain. This method of synthesising academic literature has gained acceptance across various disciplines primarily because it enhances research rigour (Dorn et al., 2016 ). In fact, the SLR method has gained wider acceptance in the management literature (Talwar et al., 2020 ) because it provides evidence-informed and reproducible research (Tranfield et al., 2003 ). As we discuss in the following paragraphs, SLRs ensure an audit trail of the decisions taken, which produces transparent, unbiased and objective results with minimum bias (Seth et al., 2020 ).

To ensure objectivity throughout the entire process, researchers follow various steps in systematically synthesising the existing body of research in a particular domain; the resulting objectivity in the process, in turn, expands opportunities for replicating as well as extending the work of the SLR (Seth et al., 2020 ; Talwar et al., 2020 ). Consistent with the procedures previous scholars have followed, we employed a four-step sequential process to systematically review research in the area of unethical leadership. We began by planning the review and ended with a descriptive analysis of the sampled studies. We now discuss these steps in detail (see Fig.  2 ).

An overview of the SLR process

Planning the Review

In this step, which aims to obtain the most relevant and greatest number of results, we ran a preliminary search on Google Scholar with the terms ‘unethical leadership’ and ‘unethical leader’. We analysed the first 100 results from this initial search to update the list of keywords that would eventually be used in developing the final corpus of studies. Then, consistent with best practices, we ran a similar search in the leading journals on ethics, including the Journal of Business Ethics , Business Ethics Quarterly and Leadership Quarterly , to ensure that we did not miss any important studies. Recent work in the domain of business ethics has supported the inclusion of these journals (Newman et al., 2020 ). The results from Google Scholar and reputed journals in business and ethics revealed that, by and large, the literature has employed uniform terminology for unethical leadership with a difference of one or two concepts, e.g. unethical supervision and bad leadership. Therefore, to ensure that we used only the most relevant search terms, we constructed a review panel, which consisted of two senior professors and two senior scholars. The panel was assembled with the intent to provide us with critical feedback and appraisal before we finalised each step in the process. After thorough discussions with the panel members, we added ‘unethical supervision’, ‘unethical supervising’ and ‘unethical supervisor’ to the initial list of keywords. Finally, we searched these terms in Scopus and Web of Science databases because these databases have been frequently used in SLRs due to the exhaustive list of journals they host, particularly in social sciences research (Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2016 ).

Screening Criteria

We established the following inclusion criteria before constructing the dataset for the present study. First, we only included studies that were peer-reviewed and published in the English language on or before 7 December 2021. Second, we included studies that contained the term unethical leadership in any part of the study, including the title, abstract, keywords or text. Third, we only included studies that had direct relevance to organisational research. Fourth, we only included studies that pertained to unethical leadership. In other words, we discarded studies that used synonyms for unethical leadership that are conceptually different from unethical leadership unless otherwise specified. The exclusion criteria caused us to omit those studies that(a) had no direct relevance to unethical leadership; (b) had little or no relevance to the organisational context—e.g. teacher samples, military samples, sports administration; (c) appeared twice with the same DOI and (d) pertained to reviews, dissertations, conference proceedings, book chapters and editorials.

Data Extraction

We used asterisk (*), 'OR' and 'AND' connectors to develop search strings for use in the databases. We retrieved a total of 1167 research articles, 555 from Scopus and 612 from the Web of Science databases. We removed duplicate items, which reduced the initial corpus to 856. These remaining studies were filtered through the inclusion and exclusion criteria, which resulted in the exclusion of 678 studies. It is important to mention here that studies pertaining to abusive supervision, destructive leadership and authentic supervision were excluded for the reasons mentioned in Sect. 2. The two authors then thoroughly and independently analysed the remaining 178 studies. After a comprehensive evaluation of these studies, we decided that another 132 studies should be removed because they were only remotely relevant to ethical leadership research and practice. For example, initially, we had shortlisted pseudo-transformational leadership (Barling et al., 2008 ) as a type of unethical leadership, but after carefully screening the text, we decided that this type of leadership does not directly pertain to the research domain of unethical leadership. This left us with 46studiesin the main dataset of the present study. Finally, we added one paper manually after conducting forward and backward chaining of the references of the 46 shortlisted papers (see Fig.  2 ). Because two authors were independently involved in this process, we assessed interrater reliability (IRR) using the kappa statistic (Landis & Koch, 1977 ), which significantly exceeded the threshold for agreement between the independent coders.

Research Profiling

A comprehensive overview of the extant literature on unethical leadership is presented in Table 1 .This includes (a) year of publication; (b) research design; (c) unit of analysis/respondent profile; (d) geographic scope and (e) theoretical perspectives. The table reveals that research on unethical leadership has progressed, particularly over the past three years. However, much of the research remains concentrated in developed nations, particularly the USA, which poses serious limitations to the generalizability of the results to emerging nations. Most scholars have employed quantitative techniques, including field surveys, laboratory experiments and field experiments, and various quantitative techniques, including structural equation modelling, logistic regression, hierarchical regression and polynomial regression, to enhance the existing understanding and the generalizability of the results. Interestingly, a good number of scholars have utilised multiple surveys in the same study to comprehensively gauge the proposed effects. For example, scholars have often used experiments and questionnaire-based surveys with different respondents in a single study to enhance the reliability and generalizability of their findings.

No consensus exists regarding the best type of scale for capturing unethical leader behaviours. We observed the use of various scales, with some of the studies simply reverse coding the ethical leadership scale items. For example, Cialdini et al. ( 2021 ) reverse coded the scale item, ‘ Sets an example of how to do things the right way in terms of ethics ’, so that a higher score represented unethical behaviour. The remainder of the studies employed toxic leadership dimensions (Ruiz-Palomino et al., 2021 ) or organisational and interpersonal deviance (Qin et al., 2021 ), or they adapted general unethical organisational behaviours to the leadership context (Fehr et al., 2020 ; Javaid et al., 2020 ).

Moral theory, institutional theory, social cognitive theory and social information processing theory have been the most widely used approaches to understand the phenomenon of unethical leadership in organisational contexts. However, we also observed that scholars have relied less on validation from other theoretical perspectives, e.g. institutional pillars, organisational structure, goal setting and stakeholder theory, among myriad others.

Finally, most of the studies have used organisations, managers, CEOs and employees as the main respondents from whom to collect data—mostly through questionnaires administered via various offline and online modes. While these categories of respondents are common in leadership research, few studies have examined leader–follower dyads.

Review of Extant Research on Unethical Leadership

We thoroughly analysed the final sample of included studies with the goal of understanding the antecedents, boundary conditions and consequences of unethical leadership. We employed the content analysis method, a qualitative data analysis technique, to analyse and synthesise the selected studies and thereby develop themes, identify critical knowledge gaps in the existing literature and suggest future research directions. We adopted a three-step protocol employed in recently published studies (Kaur et al., 2021 ; Khan et al., 2021 ; Seth et al., 2020 ), which minimises bias and produces an audit trail of crucial decisions in conducting SLRs. Following Glaser and Strauss ( 1967 ), we developed first-order codes and second-order codes and, finally, segregated the studies into aggregate theoretical dimensions (see Fig.  3 ). In the first step, we utilised open coding to categorise all of the reviewed studies into provisional categories. We then examined the studies to determine their research model and the results of the relationships hypothesised. When this was not possible, we relied on the major findings of the study to curate themes. In the next step—i.e. the axial coding process, we examined the relationships among these categories following deductive and inductive logic to arrive at broader categories. In the final step, we used the selective coding process to identify the final core/aggregate thematic dimensions, which we will discuss in the subsequent sections. In this step, we also invited two academicians with experience in ethics-related topics to review the aggregate themes developed in the prior step. Upon receiving their feedback, we made some minor changes to the themes.

Concept map of extant research on unethical leadership

The process resulted in four broad themes: antecedents, consequences, boundary conditions and miscellaneous. The first three themes are discussed at three levels: the individual, group and organisational levels. Figure  4 presents an overview of the three key thematic areas of research examined in the prior extended literature. The major scholarly work has expanded to gauge the impact of unethical leadership, with employee-related outcomes receiving the greatest attention. We also noted that group-level examinations of unethical leadership are quite scant with outright exclusion of group-level antecedents. In the following sections, we discuss these levels and the associated factors in detail and propose important research directions in the area.

An overview of associations among three key thematic areas of research on unethical leadership

Antecedents of Unethical Leadership

We discuss factors that lead to the formation of unethical leadership and identify possible knowledge gaps in this direction.

Individual-Level Antecedents

Leaders’ personality traits.

In seeking to identify individual-level factors that promote unethical leader behaviours, the prior literature has devoted significant attention to leaders’ personality traits. In particular, the literature has cited narcissism, hubris and psychopathological traits as the determinants of unethical leader behaviour. Scholars suggest that a narcissistic leader is likely to possess inflated views about his or her own achievements and capabilities, which create dysfunctional agentic relationships among leaders and followers because leaders promote their own self-interests at the expense of their followers (Campbell et al., 2011 ). Narcissistic leaders indulge in self-aggrandising and derogatory behaviours, which often causes their subordinates to perceive them as unethical in the context of organisations (Hoffman et al., 2013 ). In addition, leaders who are high in narcissism can exhibit moral entitlement, where follower pro-organisational behaviour could lead to the emergence of unethical leadership (Ahmad et al., 2020 ).

Hubris is a similar personality trait that refers to a leader’s exaggerated confidence and prestige in work-related situations. Hubris is often described as a cognitive state in which leaders develop an amplified sense of self-esteem and pride in their abilities; their inflated self-esteem and pride, in turn, makes them think that prevailing norms do not apply to them, which could result in unethical manifestations of this personality trait (Petit & Bollaert, 2012 ). Research has provided similar evidence regarding hubris among CEOs. CEO hubris has a significant influence on the unethical practice of earnings manipulation in organisations (McManus, 2016 ). In fact, hubris is positioned to stimulate leaders towards manipulative language use, which could foster an unethical climate within organisations (Akstinaite et al., 2020 ).

Finally, unethical leadership practices are also associated with psychopaths who are deficient in emotions and conscience and, thus, engage in cold, ruthless and self-seeking behaviours (Marshall et al., 2014 ). Boddy’s ( 2016 ) study supported this, finding that leader psychopathy is associated with unethical practices, including corporate scandals.

The above discussion signals that the literature, thus, far has examined only dark personality traits, which opens room for other personality frameworks in this direction. The two key research gaps in this regard are as follows. First, many individual factors, needs and behaviours remain unexamined in the literature, thus, far. Second, different personality frameworks have not been validated in the context of unethical leadership. We propose three research questions to address these research gaps. RQ1 How do leaders’ various needs (e.g. achievement, power, affiliation) produce unethical behaviours? RQ2 Do leaders’ personality traits adjust in the work context to stimulate unethical practices? RQ3 Can the cybernetic Big Five model be used to explain unethical leadership?

Leaders ‘Manipulative Tendencies

Leader immorality has long been considered the foundational pillar of unethical leadership practices within organisations (Hartman, 2000 ; Pelletier & Bligh, 2008 ). Unethical leaders are often associated with a lack of integrity and exhibit manipulative behaviours, including hypocrisy and breach of trust (Pelletier & Bligh, 2008 ). Here manipulation refers to the deliberate unethical use of leader competencies and use of manipulative communication directed towards followers in a disguised way (Auvinen et al., 2013 ). Scholars have identified leaders’ prominent statements and communication styles as fostering unethical behaviour within organisations (Akstinaite et al., 2020 ; D’Adda et al., 2014 ). Such manipulative storytelling directed towards followers is considered one possible way to fortify unethical leadership practices within organisations (Auvinen et al., 2013 ). In fact, such manipulation is also manifested in leaders’ use of their emotional competencies to serve their self-interests (Segon & Booth, 2015 ).

While immoral behaviour is the cornerstone of most negative leadership types, including unethical leadership, scholars have investigated most manipulative tendencies in isolation without any regard to leader–follower interactions or person–situation perspectives. To address this gap, we propose the following RQs. RQ1 How can a leader's expression of humour and/or anger interact with his or her moral awareness to produce unethical behaviours? RQ2 What is the relationship of leaders’ implicit personality traits (incremental and entity) and leader–situation fit on the formation of unethical leadership?

Organisational-Level Antecedents

Despite the centrality of organisational factors in the formation of unethical leadership, scholarly attention in this direction is quite scarce. One of the important organisational-level factors with the potential to facilitate unethical behaviour is the lack of organisational oversight mechanisms. When organisations have inadequate control mechanisms, lackadaisical rules enforcement and a lack of transparency, unethical leader behaviours tend to surface (Benlahcene & Meddour, 2020 ). The job specificities and role expectations that are entrusted to a leader can accentuate this effect. For example, under the framework of social role theory, the overarching importance of group goals and the expectations thereof can cause leaders to engage in unethical means to achieve the group’s ends (Hoyt et al., 2013 ). Joosten et al.'s ( 2014 ) study elucidates this effect, suggesting that the depletion of cognitive resources as a result of an excessive workload can cause the emergence of unethical leader behaviours.

Our review of the literature suggests that scholars have yet to explore the full range of organisational factors in the unethical leadership context. To that end, future research can investigate the impact of organisation structure on unethical leader behaviour. In particular, scholars could analyse the impact of new and emerging forms of organisation structures to understand their facilitating and inhibiting impact on unethical leadership. In fact, scholars can employ various theoretical frameworks, including dual-factor theory, to identify the factors that inhibit and facilitate unethical leader behaviours; such endeavours have, thus far, been entirely overlooked. Furthermore, research can explore the potential impact of technology, particularly digital technology, on unethical leadership practices. We propose the following research questions for future scholars. RQ1 Do organic and mechanistic organisational structures differ in their influence on unethical leadership? If so, under what conditions? RQ2 What are the mechanisms that underlie unethical leader behaviours in contemporary organisational structures, e.g. virtual organisations? RQ3 Can the dual-factor theory be used to investigate different sets of facilitators and inhibitors of unethical leadership at the organisational level? RQ4 How might firm digitalisation influence unethical leadership practices at the organisational level?

Consequences of Unethical Leadership

We discuss the impact of unethical leadership at various levels and identify relevant research gaps.

Individual-Level Consequences

Employee work attitudes.

Workplace attitudes are considered the fundamental mechanisms through which employees respond to the prevailing ethical or unethical culture as well as the dominant leadership style in an organisation (Zhao & Li, 2019 ). Such employee perspectives regarding their organisation’s dominant ethical or unethical tone condition their own work-related attitudes, e.g. intentions to leave (Charoensap et al., 2018 ). In addition, these favourable or unfavourable evaluations about the dominant ethical or unethical tone in the organisation, which emanate from social exchange and social learning phenomena, condition followers to exhibit positive and negative work attitudes, respectively (Ruiz-Palomino et al., 2021 ).

In this vein, scholars have not only investigated the impact of unethical leader behaviours on the development of negative work attitudes but also the deleterious impact of such behaviours on positive work attitudes. In fact, scholars are also increasingly interested in whether unethical leadership can foster positive attitudes under certain boundary conditions. For example, Moutousi and May ( 2018 ) suggested that unethical leadership that manifests in organisational change-related initiatives can result in follower attitudinal resistance to such changes, which could benefit the organisation. This study demonstrated follower resistance as a functional organisational outcome that may result whenever unethical means or unethical ends are suspected in change manifestos heralded in the organisation. The work demonstrated that change-related unethical leadership can result in followers’ resistance to change. They found evidence of the impact of unethical leader practices, including the ethicality of change-related goals and the means to achieve them, on followers’ attitudinal resistance to such change initiatives. Furthermore, the study viewed follower resistance as a positive and functional work attitude triggered by prevailing unethical change manifestos heralded in the organisation.

In sharp contrast, unethical leadership also stimulates malfeasance and the development of negative work attitudes. Johnson et al.'s ( 2017 ) study corroborated this, finding that unethical leaders encourage financial statement fraud intentions among employees. Furthermore, unethical leadership has also been found to negatively influence important work attitudes, e.g. lower job satisfaction. Thus, unethical leadership is considered detrimental to employees’ personal growth satisfaction and intentions to stay (Ruiz-Palomino et al., 2021 ). Furthermore, employees’ perceptions of the desirability of remaining with an organisation depend on the extent to which their leaders work to meet the employees’ developmental needs (Ruiz-Palomino et al., 2021 ). Because unethical leadership weakens such employee perceptions, it is logical to assume that it increases their volition to leave.

Similar evidence has been found for the influence of unethical leadership on followers’ task-specific self-efficacy (Kabat-Farr et al., 2019 ). A cognitive phenomenon, self-efficacy refers to the ‘ beliefs in one's capabilities to mobilise the motivation, cognitive resources and courses of action needed to meet given situational demands ’(Wood & Bandura, 1989 ). In the present context, task-specific self-efficacy describes an employee's subjective appraisal of his or her work-related abilities (McGonagle et al., 2015 ). By acting as workplace stressors, unethical leader behaviours negatively influence employees’ beliefs in their own ability to successfully perform their jobs (Kabat-Farr et al., 2019 ).

The prior literature suffers from inconclusive findings regarding the influence of unethical leadership on employee outcomes and the exclusion of important work attitudes. In light of the varying and inconclusive nature of the extant results, future research might consider studying other organisational factors in the context of unethical leadership. We propose two key research questions here. RQ1 How is unethical leadership related to organisational commitment? Does it influence normative, affective and continuance commitment differently? If so, how? RQ2 Does unethical leader behaviour influence work engagement and employee loyalty?

Employee Work Behaviours

Scholars have shown that unethical leadership contributes to negative workplace behaviours and, at the same time, exerts a negative influence on functional work behaviours. Drawing upon the conservation of resource theory, Qin et al. ( 2021 ) asserted that unethical leadership exerts a significant impact on employees’ knowledge hiding behaviour (Qin et al., 2021 ). In addition, unethical leader behaviours induce actual and perceived resource depletion among employees; this further reaffirms their hiding behaviour, with an aim to avoid additional resource losses. In such situations, employees not only work to protect their existing knowledge from further loss but also attempt to comply with unethical leader requests, which might violate followers’ moral grounds (Javaid et al., 2020 ). In other words, followers indulge in crimes of obedience where they find themselves abiding by leaders’ immoral actions either out of coercion or respect for their authority (Carsten & Uhl-Bien, 2013 ). This may further trigger employees to exhibit negative behaviours and reduce positive work outcomes. For example, follower perceptions of unethical leadership result in negative employee outcomes in the form of deviant workplace behaviour(DWB) and the reduction of positive work behaviours (Knoll et al., 2017 ), including organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) (Zoghbi-Manrique-de-Lara & Suárez-Acosta, 2014 ). In fact, the prevalence of interpersonal injustice has been shown to influence the perceptions of unethical leadership, which, in turn, promote negative interpersonal work behaviours (Zoghbi-Manrique-de-Lara & Suárez-Acosta, 2014 ).

Despite the above findings, it is quite surprising that few employee work behaviours have been empirically validated in the context of unethical leadership. While one study above captured DWBs, we did not locate any research that has attempted to examine counterproductive work behaviours (CPBs) directed towards the organisation. Furthermore, the impact of unethical leadership on overt employee behaviours, including scouting for a new position and leaving the organisation, remains inconclusive. Future research can investigate employees’ actual exit behaviour emanating from leaders’ unethical conduct. In fact, employee voice behaviours and pro-organisational behaviours could provide significant insights into the phenomenon of unethical leadership. Finally, given the intrusion of digital technology in the workplace, the influence of unethical leadership on cyber loafing would be worth scholarly investigation. We enumerate the following key research questions for future research. RQ1 Under what conditions does unethical leadership result in destructive and constructive employee behaviours? RQ2 What is the incidence of unethical leadership on employees’ actual exit behaviour? RQ3 How and when does unethical leader behaviour result in cyber loafing?

Employee Emotions

While employee emotions are increasingly seen as important work-related feelings directed at supervisors and organisations ( b ; Peng, Schaubroeck, et al., 2019 ), the extant literature on unethical leadership has not comprehensively captured employee emotions in the work context. We found very little evidence of the emotional outrage that prevailing unethical practices in the organisation might provoke among employees. However, this stimulation of negative emotions directed at organisations and their leaders as a response to unethical leader behaviours can take the form of employee cynicism, pessimism, fear and paranoid tendencies (Pelletier & Bligh, 2008 ). Pelletier and Blight ( 2008 ) found that employees experience a heightened sense of disillusionment, abhorrence and anger after being exposed to unethical leader behaviours. In fact, in their study, 50% of these emotional reactions took the form of frustration, which employees expressed in the form of cynical statements aimed at organisational practices, retributive justice and unsuccessful implementation of ethics intervention. These reactions to the breach of trust resulting from unethical leadership (Knoll et al., 2017 ) can also promote fear and increased suspicion among employees (Pelletier & Bligh, 2008 ).

While we found some evidence of the negative emotional backlash arising from unethical leadership, scholars have yet to produce conclusive evidence regarding the impact of unethical leader behaviours on negative as well as positive employee emotions. Future research can investigate whether unethical leadership results in emotional dissonance such that employees experience incompatibility between what they feel and what they express. This has potential relevance to the domain of unethical leadership research because employees, as a result of their respect for authority and fear at the workplace, might experience such emotional inconsistency. Another research direction pertains to the impact of unethical leadership on emotional labour (both service and non-service organisations), where affective events theory and social information processing theory (Salancik & Pfefer, 1978 ) offer useful theoretical lenses. Furthermore, mediation analysis has the potential to determine whether employee exhaustion and psychological burnout resulting from unethical leadership influence the work–life balance and employee well-being. Finally, employee happiness is another research area where unethical leadership plays a potential role. We recommend that scholars examine the following RQs. RQ1 Can unethical leadership result in employee emotional dissonance? RQ2 Is unethical leadership related to work–family balance or employee well-being? If so, what are the psychological mechanisms to it?

Employee Performance

In the present context, efforts to understand the role of unethical leadership in the task performance of employees, including the quality and efficiency of their work output, have been quite scarce. We identified only one a single significant study from the selected pool that examined the impact of unethical leadership on employee performance. It found that unethical leader behaviour decreases employee performance by influencing employees' moral mental maps (Gan et al., 2019 ). When employees witness amoral practices in their organisation, their moral identity activates; this, in turn, reduces their work discipline and productivity.

Scholars have largely neglected the performance outcomes that result from unethical leadership. Furthermore, prior studies lack robust theoretical frameworks that could be used to explain how unethical leadership influences employees’ task-specific performance. Noting the dearth of studies related to job performance, we suggest the use of self-determination theory to understand work motivations in the context of unethical leadership. Self-determination theory (Rigby & Ryan, 2018 ) can provide a useful theoretical lens to understand potential interactions between various levels of employee work motivations (from low quality to high quality) and unethical leadership behaviours, which, in turn, influence employee job performance. Furthermore, scholars can use the job-demands-resources (JD-R) (Lesener et al., 2019 ) model to investigate the ways in which unethical leadership increases the psychological and physiological costs associated with a job by increasing job demands (e.g. extra work shifts demanded by the leader) and reducing job resources (e.g. lack of supervisor support) to influence employee performance. We suggest three key research questions for future research. RQ1 How do various levels of employee work motivations interact with unethical leadership behaviours to influence job performance? RQ2 Does task-specific performance of employees could be influenced by unethical leadership? Can self-determination theory offer a useful theoretical lens? RQ3 In what ways does unethical leadership increase the psychological and physiological costs associated with employee performance? Can the JD-R model be used to investigate this phenomenon?

Group-Level Consequences

Scholars have investigated the potential consequences of unethical leadership at the group or team level. Cialdini et al.( 2021 ) studied the impact of unethical leadership on group members’ turnover intentions. Drawing on the attraction–selection–attrition model, the study established that unethical leader behaviours increase group members’ intentions to leave their organisations. Furthermore, followers who intend to stay with an organisation after unethical encounters engage more in cheating and other unethical group behaviours (Cialdini et al., 2021 ). D’Adda et al. ( 2014 ) found similar evidence, demonstrating that unethical leader behaviours are causally related to group members’ unethical conduct. These studies suggest that unethical leadership can stimulate an unethical climate among workgroups, which could, in turn, negatively impact other group behaviours. For example, unethical leader behaviours hinder team creativity by fostering knowledge hiding behaviours among group members ( b ; Peng, Schaubroeck, et al., 2019 ). Under the framework of social information processing and social learning theory, the study reported that team members experience psychological distress and exhibit a dysfunctional sense of competitiveness that is detrimental to team creativity.

Given the paucity of research on group-level outcomes in the context of unethical leadership, scholars must devote additional research to understanding the implications of unethical leadership at the team level. One such fundamental research direction, which has, thus, far received no attention, is the impact of unethical leadership on group performance. Future research can study in-role (task-specific) and extra-role (helping behaviour) group performances and the mechanisms through which unethical leadership influences them. Another potential area of interest might explore whether unethical leadership can trigger group conflict through in-group and out-group categorisations. In this context, social categorisation theory may prove useful. Finally, scholars can investigate group organisational citizenship behaviours to understand the circumstances in which unethical leadership promotes or hinders such pro-organisational team behaviours. Consistent with this discussion, we outline the following potential research questions. RQ1 How is unethical leadership related to group performance? RQ2 Through what specific mechanisms does unethical leadership influence in-role and extra-role group behaviours? RQ3 Can unethical leadership hinder or foster group pro-organisational behaviours? Why or why not? RQ4 Does unethical leadership result in group conflict? How can social categorisation theory lend support to this phenomenon?

Organisational-Level Consequences

We found very few scholarly investigations of the organisational-level outcomes associated with unethical leadership. Furthermore, the research pertaining to this level of consequences is extremely disparate, with the studies pertaining to various organisational dynamics. For example, Vasconcelos ( 2015 ) found that unethical leadership contributes to derogatory discrimination framing of the organisation, which may result in a negative corporate image. Furthermore, unethical leadership can foster unsustainable corporate practices, including corporate scandals that can tarnish organisations’ social responsibility ethics (Mujkic & Klingner, 2019 ). In an entirely different context, unethical leadership has been found to result in the failure of information systems that aim to foster control mechanisms within organisations (Sherif et al., 2016 ). The study establishes the strategic importance of leadership ethics where the ethical or unethical tone set by the leaders determines the success of such control mechanisms. The study further highlighted the ways in which unethical leadership can circumvent the potential use of information systems by fostering unethical conduct that supersedes control interventions.

The prior literature, however, does not provide clear empirical evidence on the organisational consequences of unethical leadership. Furthermore, evidence pertaining to contemporary forms of performance measures are lacking. In light of the paucity of existing research, future research can investigate the impact of unethical leadership on firm performance, market share and firm value. Apart from these outcomes, scholars can study firm innovation performance and sustainable business model innovation in the context of unethical leadership. We, thus, propose the following key RQs. RQ1 How does unethical leadership translate into various organisational outcomes, e.g. financial performance, market share? RQ2 In what ways does unethical leadership influence green innovation practices within organisations? RQ3 What are the mechanisms through which unethical leadership relate to sustainable business performance?

Boundary Conditions of Unethical Leadership

In this section, we discuss important boundary conditions that have been established either to mitigate or to exacerbate the negative consequences of unethical leadership as well as the various coping mechanisms and amplifiers that are critical in scholarship on unethical leadership.

Individual-Level Boundary Conditions

Follower moral awareness and ethical ideology.

The contemporary line of discourse in leadership research is witnessing a burgeoning interest in the active role that followers play in the dyadic and reciprocal nature of leadership phenomena (Uhl-Bien et al., 2014 ). Follower perspectives have been advanced to provide a more comprehensive picture of the emergence of various leadership practices (Carsten & Uhl-Bien, 2012 ) and insights into the co-production of unethical organisational behaviours (Carsten & Uhl-Bien, 2013 ). In fact, in the context of the present study, follower morals and ethicality have been established to condition the impact of unethical leadership via its various consequences. Javaid et al.'s ( 2020 ) work supports this assertion, finding differences in followers’ moral awareness and the tendency of unethical leadership to foster unethical employee behaviours. Based on socio-cognitive theory, the study advances the role of follower moral cognition and awareness in mitigating the effects of unethical leadership on unethical work behaviours. Similarly, followers with a high propensity to morally disengage retain higher levels of trust in their unethical leaders and exhibit greater support for unethical leader behaviours than do followers with a low propensity for moral disengagement (Fehr et al., 2020 ). Scholars have attributed such differences in follower compliance with unethical leader requests to follower ethical ideologies such that followers’ scores on relativism and idealism determine their perceptions and reactions to any unethical encounters (Moutousi & May, 2018 ). Followers high on idealism and low on relativism are, thus, likely to be more sensitive to the unethical practices in which their leaders engage. The common thread in these studies pertains to the followers’ moral awakening and the strengthening of their good conscience, which may reduce occurrences of unethical behaviours within the organisation (Solas, 2016 ).

While follower-focused studies are valuable, we believe leader-specific behaviours, social and ethnic ascriptions require further examination. To date, scholars have not explored leader-related factors that could condition the impact of unethical leadership. We suggest the following potential research questions. RQ1 What is the relevance of leader religious affiliations and religiosity to unethical leadership practices? Can cross-cultural studies benefit from this line of investigation? RQ2 How and under what circumstances does a leader’s gender condition the effects of unethical leadership?

Follower Traits and Behaviours

Despite the importance of follower traits in the leadership domain, we encountered only two studies in which follower tendencies and socially constructed follower identity were able to resist or amplify unethical leadership within organisations. Stouten et al. ( 2019 ) showed that employee silence plays a strategic and functional role in circumventing the negative effects of unethical leadership. Employee silence has been considered a significant dysfunctional employee behaviour that could fortify unethical leader behaviours (Morrison, 2014 ). Based on the 'see-judge-act' mechanism, however, employees can better understand the ethicality of a situation and develop more robust responses beyond merely voicing their opinions (Stouten et al., 2019 ). Furthermore, unethical leader requests are filtered through the socially constructed ideation of followership. In particular, follower good citizenship and insubordination determine whether unethical leadership is welcomed or abhorred. In other words, followers who exhibit good citizenship are more inclined to abide by their leaders’ unethical requests than followers who tend towards insubordination (Knoll et al., 2017 ). Moreover, employee grit—defined as ‘ perseverance and passion for long-term goals’ (Duckworth et al., 2007 )—moderates the relationship between unethical leader behaviour and employee outcomes. Seeking to gauge this effect, Kabat-Farr et al. ( 2019 ) documented the insignificant impact of unethical leadership on the perceived workability of high grit employees. The study also indicated that this relationship holds even when employee job involvement is high. Finally, followers who are inclined towards self-sacrificing and self-enhancement but who hold less proactive attitudes exhibit greater compliance with CEO requests (Johnson et al., 2017 ).

Based on the above discussion, the extant literature has rigorously studied personality factors, while leaving room, however, for future investigations of various job and career-related issues. Thus, we recommend that scholars address the following research question. RQ1 Does employees’ career adaptability influence the practice of unethical leadership within organisations?

Leader–Follower Nexus

Another individual-level boundary mechanism that can influence the outcomes of unethical leadership falls under the leader–follower connection. We understand this connection in terms of the moral congruence between leaders and followers and the quality of the relationship they share. Moral or value congruence refers to a follower's perception of the fit between the values he or she holds and the values the leader holds (Cable & De Rue, 2002 ). This concordance of moral and ethical principles has been considered fundamental in followers’ perceptions of leadership, both ethical and unethical (Egorov et al., 2020 ). In fact, when followers and leaders have entirely different moral identities, followers are more likely to develop unethical leadership perceptions (Giessner & van Quaquebeke, 2010 ). Studies have empirically validated the ability of this leader–follower value congruence to condition the impact of unethical leadership on follower outcomes, with high-value congruence amplifying the effect (Fehr et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, the quality of relationships between leaders and followers in the form of leader–member exchange (LMX) can also exacerbate the negative consequences of unethical leadership. For example, Gan et al. ( 2019 ) highlighted that situations of high LMX lead employees to exhibit poor job performance as a result of their greater sensitivity to unethical leader behaviours. This suggests that followers who have high reciprocity with their leaders may reduce their job performance.

While scholars have validated value congruence in the context of unethical leadership, we believe other leader–follower parameters require further investigation. Apart from moral congruence, we understand little about the role of the leader–follower nexus in unethical leadership. We suggest future studies examine the following RQ. RQ1 Do cross-generational differences surface in leader–follower dyads? If so, what is their impact on unethical leadership?

Group-Level Boundary Conditions

At the team level, scholars have paid scant attention to delineating the boundary mechanisms that might moderate team-related outcomes. Cialdini et al.'s ( 2021 )study positioned value congruence at the group level as an important boundary condition that stimulates selective attrition among group members who experience unethical leader behaviour. These group members’ perceptions of the fit between group moral values and their own ethicality (Kristof-Brown et al., 2005 ) determine their future course of action, including their decisions to leave the group or engage in malfeasance. Another group-level moderator used in the context of unethical leadership pertains to job design in groups. Goncalo and Staw ( 2006 ) found that team–task interdependence facilitates information sharing and increases the interdependence of group members in the successful completion of group tasks. Such job characteristics can mitigate the negative consequences of unethical leadership on group-level outcomes, e.g. team creativity ( b ; Peng, Schaubroeck, et al., 2019 ).

The existing research on group-level moderators is shallow, exhibits disparate results and has neglected important team- and group-level constructs. Given the paucity of research on group-level boundary conditions, we enumerate some critical research avenues with the potential to advance the literary developments in this area. RQ1 What is the role of group diversity in mitigating the negative impact of unethical leadership? RQ2 In what ways can groupthink promote unethical leadership practices within organisations?

Organisational-Level Boundary Conditions

At the organisational level, scholars have suggested work design as a coping mechanism against the potential downsides of unethical leadership. For example, job complexity, defined as the degree of complexity a job involves (Morgeson & Humphrey, 2006 ), increases employee interdependence and knowledge sharing, which, in turn, help mitigate the negative effects of unethical leadership (Qin et al., 2021 ). Ruiz-Palomino et al. ( 2021 ) reported similar evidence, demonstrating that a responsibility climate can act as a buffer for the effects of unethical leader behaviour. Their study utilised job autonomy to manifest the responsibility climate of organisations where employees are entrusted with the responsibilities of their jobs and delegated adequate job authority (Ahmad et al., 2018 ). Another organisational-level coping mechanism is a resilient ethical culture that can transcend and resist unethical leader behaviours. Ethical culture delineates the line between ethical and unethical behaviours and can enable employees to develop perceptions to guide their ethical assessments of leaders’ behaviours (Kaptein, 2011 ). In the context of unethical leadership, an ethical culture could encounter unethical leader practices through a robust succession process, the eradication of perceptions of inequity, efforts to overcome moral blindness and the banality of evil and to reduce moral mutism through control mechanisms (Roque et al., 2020 ).

The above discussion reveals that scholars have examined the roles of few organisational factors in circumventing the impact of unethical leadership. In fact, most of the papers dwelt on organisational design perspectives while neglecting structure- and size-related factors. We suggest scholars explore the following RQs in future studies. RQ1 How does ownership structure relate to unethical leadership practices? RQ2 Can organisation size moderate the impact of unethical leadership? RQ3 Do unethical leadership practices differ significantly between leaders of large and small firms?

Miscellaneous

In this section, we discuss studies that did not fit in any of the prior categories. These pertain to the taxonomy of unethical leadership, the development of followers’ perceptions of unethical leadership in general and in different cultures and the country-specific conditions that influence the practice of unethical leadership at the macro-level.

Ünal et al.’s ( 2012 ) extension of the conceptual underpinnings of unethical leadership added the dimensions of utilitarianism, perceptions of justice and the right to dignity as important normative grounds to define unethical leadership in a robust way. These dimensions enhanced the conceptual rigour of unethical leadership, which the existing literary work in the field has largely ignored.

In another approach to unethical leadership in work contexts, scholars have gauged the influence of various individual-, organisational- and country-specific factors on perceptions of unethical leadership. For example, managers’ demographic characteristics, including age, gender, tenure and education, have been shown to influence their perceptions of unethical leadership (Lašáková& Remišová, 2019). In a slightly different context, follower perceptions of unethical leadership stem from the reputation that a leader has prior to the manifestation of infidelity at work and the degree to which the leader’s discretion involved the abuse of power (Grover & Hasel, 2018 ). As expected, these perceptions vary across countries. However, similar attributions of unethical leadership have also surfaced in the prior literature. While noting differences in the perceptions of unethical leadership across cultures, Resick et al. ( 2011 )also identified dominant perceptions that held across six countries. Similarly, Eisenbeiß and Brodbeck ( 2014 ) found that managers’ perceptions of unethical leadership in Eastern and Western countries are specific to their cultural roots, but some attributions, including those regarding a leader’s honesty, integrity, responsibility etc., remain constant across countries (Kimura & Nishikawa, 2018 ). Apart from institutional pressures from a country’s media, shareholders also influence the practice of unethical leadership (Chen, 2010a , 2010b ).

While the above studies have captured institutional factors, we did not locate any robust study delineating the impact of various institutional conditions on the formation of unethical leadership. It is important to note that broader institutional pillars can influence the perceptions of moral behaviour as well as the legality of actions in a country. Thus, we propose that future scholars address the following RQs. RQ1 How do a country’s institutional conditions (regulatory, normative and socio-cultural) influence unethical leadership? RQ2 Does the institutional stability of a country influence the extent of unethical leadership in organisations within that country?

Conceptual Framework and Potential Models

In this section, we discuss our multi-level conceptual framework and potential research models, which scholars can further investigate to advance the literary space of unethical leadership. Our multi-level conceptual framework essentially extends the existing body of work on unethical leadership while including the missing elements identified in the knowledge gaps (see Sect. 4). The extant literature has neglected group-level mechanisms—in particular, group-level antecedents—as well as organisational-level consequences and antecedents (see Fig.  4 ). Our conceptual model addresses these lacunae by capturing the missing elements and organising the extant work in a multi-level framework. While the multi-level framework addresses the broader themes in the field, the proposed potential research models discern precise research directions informed by the multi-level framework. Scholars have suggested that proposing potential models enables us to address critical knowledge gaps in the existing literature and thereby inform theoretical as well practical developments in the field (Shamsollahi et al., 2021 ).

Micro-Meso-Macro (M3) Framework of Unethical Leadership

Our segregation of the sampled studies into various themes offers a broader understanding of the similarities and differences in the extant academic discourse on unethical leadership and allowed us to uncover various knowledge gaps in the current body of work. Following this understanding and using inductive logic, we developed a M3 framework of unethical leadership using a multi-level analysis approach. Multiple levels of analysis are quite popular among organisational research scholars primarily because their use facilitates a robust analytical focus by offering linkages among the various units of organisations (Roberts, 2020 ).

Approaching leadership contexts from a multi-level perspective also captures the leadership dynamics within organisations in a comprehensive manner (Schriesheim et al., 2009 ). With the presence of teams, workgroups, individuals, departments and dyads, organisations are inherently multi-level entities, which is sufficient to justify the use of multiple levels of analysis in work contexts (Kwon et al., 2016 ). Because leadership manifests at different levels in an organisation, it is imperative to understand leadership research at various levels to gauge a particular process or phenomenon at its respective level and in relation to other levels (Barbour, 2017 ).

The level of analysis refers to the specific unit (individual, group or department) within an organisation where a particular effect is desired or a particular phenomenon is to be studied (Barbour, 2017 ). Methodologically, therefore, leadership can operate at micro, meso and macro levels, which are, in turn, interconnected. Macro-level analysis pertains to the broader organisational factors, including organisational structure, culture and processes that act as contextual factors in understanding leadership dynamics (Markham, 2010 ). Drawing insights from the results of the current study, we argue that macro-level factors operating at the country level can also influence leadership practices within organisations. These factors pertain to ‘ strategies for governing ’ and constitute ‘ building blocks ’ for maintaining national order. Beneath these foundational pillars sits a country’s institutional complex, which influences unethical leadership practices (Chen, 2010a ).

Micro-level analysis is arguably the most commonly researched level, which focuses on individual-level processes and outcomes . Micro-level leadership variables include leadership skills, traits, leader–member exchange, member cognition and interpersonal communication where the individual is the main unit of the analysis (Gardner & Cogliser, 2009 ). Meso-level analysis, finally, centres on the mechanisms involved in the interaction of micro and macro perspectives (Barbour, 2017 ). At this level, the unit of analysis is teams, groups and networks that connect various functional parts of the organisation and in which leader and follower behaviours influence organisational factors and vice versa(Gardner & Cogliser, 2009 ). We organised our understanding of the academic literature on unethical leadership around these three levels and developed a framework that facilitates a multi-level understanding of the phenomenon.

In our M3 framework, we discuss antecedents, boundary conditions and consequences of unethical leadership at the micro, meso and macro levels (see Fig.  5 ). As the framework illustrates, unethical leadership can operate at various levels within an organisation. The solid boxes represent work based on the extant literature of unethical leadership, while the dotted boxes are the authors' own compilations. The prior literature has largely neglected the country-level consequences and group-level antecedents, which also provide avenues for future research.

A multi-level M3 framework of unethical leadership

We expect cross-level and reciprocal interactions between these levels, which are functional in unethical leadership processes. For example, at the micro-level, scholars might gauge the influence of individual antecedents, including leaders’ ethical ideologies and personality traits, in terms of their individual, group and organisational consequences. In fact, a reciprocal and cross-level dynamism exists among individual, group and organisational factors. This means a micro-level investigation is not complete unless and until it incorporates macro- and meso-level interventions. For example, an attempt to explore the impact of leader traits on employees’ unethical behaviour would be incomplete if the study did not also account for organisational factors (culture, size and job design). Similarly, macro-level factors, which, in the context of the current study, are conceptualised as national and organisational factors, influence both the occurrence and the consequences of unethical leadership.

We expect national regulatory, normative and cognitive pillars to influence organisational, group and individual factors across the anticipated effects (antecedents, boundary conditions and consequences). Apart from institutional factors, national culture has a trickle-down effect in our framework, which promotes the general and mass prevalence of unethical practices in a country’s organisational, group and individual dynamics. Here again, incorporating meso- and micro-level boundary conditions, e.g. follower morality and ethical group culture, influences the degree and extent of the proposed effect.

Potential Models for Future Research

We offer seven potential research models to direct future scholars in this area.

Potential Model 1

Dark personality traits have largely dominated the discussion regarding the individual-level antecedents of unethical leadership, which leaves ample room for validating the roles of other leader-specific factors. One such factor might be a leader’s inclination towards power and achievement, which could potentially influence his or her proclivity towards unethical practices. Furthermore, this influence could be circumvented or exacerbated by the prevailing institutional conditions in a country, which are related to ethical codes and the morality and legality of actions. We propose a potential model (see Fig.  6 ) based on McClelland’s ( 1985 ) theory of needs and Scott’s ( 1995 ) institutional theory to examine the formation of unethical leadership under the influence of a leader’s individuality as well as the prevailing country-level factors. We propose that leaders are essentially motivated by a certain need to engage in unethical practices, which could be their need for power ( n Pow) or achievement ( n Ach).

Model of unethical leadership under the framework of institutional theory and theory of needs

Our proposition is informed by the recent literature, which suggests that power and status play a key role in encouraging unethical decisions (Liu et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, we expect a leader’s need for affiliation ( n Aff) to be negatively associated with unethical leadership, given the fact that leaders high in this need are motivated by concerns for the collective welfare and warm interpersonal relationships (Steinmann et al., 2020 ). This effect, however, would likely be conditioned by the laws and regulations in a particular nation as well as by the normative standards of behaviour and beliefs pertaining to the morality of actions. We expect these regulatory and normative macro-level factors to condition the micro-level effect of leader needs on the incidence of unethical leadership. A cross-country study exploring these relationships would, thus, be of immense value.

Potential Model 2

Closely examining Fig.  5 reveals that the extant literature has focused least on group-level mechanisms while completely neglecting group-level antecedents. Thus, to advance group-level mechanisms in the context of unethical leadership, we proposed a model based on social identity theory, fit theory and value congruity theory (see Fig.  7 ). As the model illustrates, group identification maybe a central pivot around which followers categorise themselves in a highly relevant social context and which camouflages the reasoning of individual members under the influence of an unethical leader. Put simply, under the framework of social identity theory (Ashforth et al., 2008 ), individuals develop a sense of shared social categorisation, which is contingent upon the work context in question (Scheepers & Derks, 2016 ). This shared categorisation or in-group membership enables the development of collective or shared group identity, which is expected to result in various group-related outcomes, including group cohesiveness, groupthink and group conformity (Hogg, 2018 ). These effects, however, are contingent upon the fit that a group member perceives between himself or herself and the rest of the group (Cai et al., 2018 ). This ‘compatibility between an individual and his [or her] workgroup’ (Kristof-Brown et al., 2014 ) is likely to enhance the member’s perceptions of his or her collective identity with the group and thereby strengthen groupthink. With studies showing the role of groupthink in constraining ideation and building socially restrictive minds (Fox, 2019 ), we also expect it to foster unethical leadership practices. Therefore, we anticipate that meso-level dynamics will translate into micro-level influences where collective thinking at the group level constrains the honest appraisal of the task under the influence of congruence expected between an employee and his group. Since group-level mechanisms are yet to get fully explored, a qualitative study would be suitable in this direction.

Model of unethical leadership under the framework of fit theory, social identity theory and value congruity theory

Potential Model 3

We highlight the impact of institutional factors on unethical leadership formation under the framework of institutional theory. As discussed in our M3 framework (see Fig.  5 ) and miscellaneous theme, a country’s institutional context may be a significant contributor to unethical leadership. Hence, we propose that institutional uncertainty within a nation—in terms of abruptly changing laws, erratic and random formal procedures and low levels of economic freedom (Boudreaux et al., 2019 )—increases the incidence of unethical behaviours (see Fig.  8 ). We expect political uncertainty, defunct regulatory checks, nepotism and widespread corruption (Kelling et al., 2021 ) to weaken the social and organisational fabric. Such institutional uncertainty also reduces trust among organisational members, which could further encourage unethical leadership practices because lack of trust is considered to be one of the biggest sources of organisational misconduct and malfeasance (Ndalamba, 2019 ). Given the centrality of morality in unethical leadership as depicted in the prior literature (Pelletier & Bligh, 2008 ), however, we contend that this effect is conditional upon the extent to which leaders are morally awake. Therefore, we expect a trickle-down effect under the M3 framework such that macro-level inconsistencies are inflicted upon meso-level (group-level) interactions and, finally, result in micro-level consequences.

Model of unethical leadership under the framework of institutional theory

Potential Model 4

While reviewing the literature on the consequences of unethical leadership, we observed that psychological outcomes have received scant attention. In light of this gap, we developed a research model (see Fig.  9 ) that delineates the psychological costs associated with unethical leadership under the framework of conservation of resource theory (COR). COR is fundamentally a resource conservation strategy through which individuals seek to minimise losses and increase the odds of making gains in work settings (Hobfoll, 2002 ; Hobfoll et al., 2018 ). While material resources initially served as the main elements of interest, psychological resources have increasingly figured into the research context (Qin et al., 2021 ). We observed many investigations of follower-related outcomes in the context of unethical leadership; however, we were unable to locate a single study that ventured into the realm of work–life balance. We contend that unethical leadership has the potential to drain employees of their psychological resources, which may, in turn, deplete their psychological capital and eventually produce burnout. This depletion of resources is also likely to trickle down to affect, causing employees to experience issues in balancing their work and family commitments (Leitão et al., 2019 ). We expect these micro-level interactions to feature at the macro-level in the form of organisational performance.

Model of unethical leadership under the framework of conservation of resource theory (COR)

Potential Model 5

In terms of the consequences of unethical leadership, we found a dearth of studies on employee behaviours, with scholars particularly neglecting contemporary behaviours that are influenced by the digitalisation of work. To that end, we propose a research model that captures the impact of unethical leadership on cyber loafing (Fig.  10 ). Cyber loafing is defined as ‘a set of behaviours at work in which an employee engages in electronically mediated activities, particularly through the use of the internet, that his or her immediate supervisor would not consider job-related ’ (Askew et al., 2014 ). We propose that unethical leadership induces cyber loafing through the mediating effect of workplace ostracism among employees. Workplace ostracism refers to the feeling of being socially isolated from the group and the strong perception of oneself as a member of the out-group (Ferris et al., 2008 ). We expect unethical leadership behaviour to provoke this type of workplace aggression as an employee response. This feeling of social isolation among employees in work contexts may result in various deviant workplace behaviours (Yeik, 2018 ). For example, we propose that such exclusion may prompt employees to engage in cyber loafing (i.e. activities and time that employees spend on digital devices and digital content over and above what is demanded by their work). Such deviance could be circumvented, however, by the inherent nature of the job, which may keep employees more engaged and more dependent on their co-workers. Drawing on the job characteristics model (JCM) (Hackman, 1980 ), we propose that when a task is inherently rich in skill variety, the proclivity of employees to roam the Internet and social media may decline. Therefore, we expect a macro-level boundary condition to circumvent the negative impact of unethical leadership on micro-level consequences. Since, we found quantitative traces of job design in the extant literature, exploratory sequential research designs could be employed in future.

Model of unethical leadership under the framework of job design theory and workplace ostracism

Potential Model 6

We developed a model of unethical leadership that delineates its impact on the contemporary forms of organisational performance. Recognising the increasing prominence of sustainability in organisations’ strategic decision making (Nicholson & Kurucz, 2019 ), our sixth model of unethical leadership captures organisations’ green innovation performance (see Fig.  11 ). Working within the micro–macro nexus, we propose a model that links organisational perspectives with individual-level perspectives. At the micro-level, we expect unethical leadership to negatively influence employees’ green creativity, which refers to their novel ideation of green products, green services and pro-environmental solutions (Tuan, 2020 ). Under the framework of COR, we expect employees’ mental exhaustion to negatively influence this creative capacity. However, we also expect organisational structure, which is a macro-level boundary condition, to moderate this effect. In a lean and flexible organisational structure, this effect could be circumvented via the open flow of communication (rather than a hierarchical bureaucratic structure). We also expect unethical leadership to negatively influence green innovation performance under the moderating impact of green human resource management practices. Organisations’ efforts to implement green practices nurture a culture that values and endorses green behaviour and, thus, influence green organisational performance (Mousa & Othman, 2020 ). Furthermore, we suggest that scholars investigate the mediating effect of green creativity on the relationship between unethical leadership and innovation performance and explore the impact of organisation size or culture.

Model of unethical leadership under the framework of the theory of organisational structure and sustainability

Potential Model 7

Given the increasing digitalisation of the workplace and the ethical challenges that accompany this transition, it is important to explore the possible mechanisms through which unethical leader behaviour may result in such situations. We, thus, developed a model (see Fig.  12 ) that links the digitalisation of the workplace with unethical leadership practices. Scholars have predicted the potential of digitalisation to generate ample opportunities for digital fraud (Kumar et al., 2021 ) when broader industry standards regarding technology and its use are largely absent (Foucart & Li, 2021 ).These opportunities, moreover, are ultimately likely to translate into unethical leader behaviour under the influence of organisational size. Indeed, Archambeault and Webber ( 2018 ) showed that both the incidence of fraud and the chances of organisational survival after its discovery are comparatively higher in large rather than small organisations.

Model of unethical leadership under the framework of the theory of organisational structure and digitalisation of work

Study Implications

Theoretical implications.

The present SLR unravelled various specific underpinnings of the unethical leadership literature while also identifying a good number of areas where impactful research could advance the theoretical robustness of the field.

First and foremost, the present study provides evidence that the field of unethical leadership is not only understudied (i.e. only a small number of studies have actually explored unethical leadership as a distinct concept) but also disjointed. The domain of unethical leadership, in fact, exhibits serious limitations as a result of concept proliferation, which scholars regularly but inappropriately interchange. Seeking to remedy these limitations, our study advances a comprehensive picture of the existing body of work on unethical leadership while also differentiating unethical leadership from other concepts; in doing so, it justifies further investigations of this type of leadership. Having engaged in a nested multi-level analysis of this leadership type, we offer critical insights into the operation of unethical leadership at various levels of analysis.

Second, the present SLR illuminates the prominent theoretical perspectives in the domain of unethical leadership. We assert that theories focused primarily on morality have largely dominated the field. Given the nature of unethical leadership, it is logical to expect the application of such theories, including moral foundations theory (Egorov et al., 2020 ), moral licencing theory (Ahmad et al., 2020 ) and moral self-regulation (Joosten et al., 2014 ). Apart from morality, however, the field of unethical leadership could benefit from the theoretical rigour of other theories. For example, self-determination theory (Rigby & Ryan, 2018 ) may provide a useful theoretical lens to understand the interactions between various levels of employee work motivations (from low quality to high quality) and unethical leadership behaviours, which, in turn, influence job performance. Similarly, the JD-R model (Lesener et al., 2019 )could be used to investigate the role of unethical leadership in increasing job demands (e.g. extra work shifts demanded by the leader) and reducing job resources (e.g. lack of supervisor support) and thereby increasing the psychological and physiological costs associated with a job and influencing various employee outcomes. Furthermore, affective events theory and social information processing theory (Salancik & Pfefer, 1978 ) offer useful theoretical lenses to understand the impact of unethical leadership on emotional labour.

Third, we propose a multi-level framework that identifies antecedents, consequences and boundary mechanisms of unethical leadership at three levels of analysis, i.e. the micro, macro and meso levels. We also identify various individual-, group-, organisational- and country-level factors that could heighten the consequences of unethical leadership. It is important to mention here that the literature pertaining to national-level factors and group-level factors remains scant, and the focus of most studies has been on either individual- or organisational-level factors. Furthermore, employee-related outcomes, especially attitudinal and behavioural outcomes, have received the most attention, which opens ways to understand the impact of unethical leadership on various other outcomes. For example, the impact of unethical leadership on overt employee behaviours, including scouting for a new position and leaving the organisation, has not been conclusively uncovered. Future research can investigate actual exit behaviour resulting from leaders’ unethical conduct. Although one study captured DWBs, we did not locate any research attempting to examine CPBs directed towards the organisation. Similarly, future scholars could investigate group organisational citizenship behaviours to understand the circumstances under which unethical leadership can promote or hinder pro-organisational team behaviours. Again, the extant literature has provided an inadequate account of the impact of unethical leadership on organisational outcomes. Future research can, thus, investigate the impact of unethical leadership on firm performance, market share and firm value. Apart from these outcomes, scholars can explore firm innovation performance and sustainable business model innovation in the context of unethical leadership. Beyond examining various outcomes and antecedents, our framework also highlights the possibility of cross-level interactions among the factors, which can further advance our understanding of unethical leadership. For example, employing hierarchical modelling, scholars can gauge the trickle-down effect of unethical leadership from the individual level to the team level or from the organisational level to the individual level while also considering differences in the outcomes at each level. Specifically, the ethical climate at the organisational level might influence perceptions of ethical leadership at the team level, which, mediated by employee exhaustion and psychological burnout, are likely to produce work–life conflict and an adverse impact on employee well-being.

Fourth, our study advances theory-based potential research models, which future researchers can empirically validate. By relying on well-established theories to clearly identify paths and contextual factors, we advance the theoretical rigour in the area. Informed by our M3 framework, these models provide critical insights into the formation and outcomes of unethical leadership at various levels of analysis. Furthermore, because they are not exhaustive, these models suggest additional investigations in this area.

Finally, we systematically present research gaps in the extant literature. In other words, we identify research gaps pertaining to each theme and propose potential research questions for each thematic category. Given the consequential nature of unethical leadership practices, we believe our research questions can guide scholars who seek to uncover various facets and mechanisms of unethical leadership. For example, our research highlights the outright neglect of the group-level antecedents of unethical leadership. Because team-based structures are here to stay, especially in today's era of digitalisation, efforts to explore this space can be quite valuable to unethical leadership research.

Practical Implications

From a practical standpoint, our work shifts the focus of managers and practitioners towards the gravity of unethical leadership while sensitising them to the diverse factors that can encourage unethical leadership and the strategies that can mitigate its negative effects.

First, our study highlights the critical nature of job design, which, when done appropriately, can serve as a coping mechanism to mitigate the negative effects of unethical leadership. Organisations must strategically design work unit structures to suppress unethical instincts and promote information sharing.

Second, our work entails serious implications for HR practices within organisations. Having highlighted its role in unethical leadership, we assert personality’s importance in the selection process of organisations. In fact, apart from selecting the moral soul, efforts to foster moral character through ethics training and management exercises could have strategic importance. Furthermore, performance appraisals, incentives and promotion avenues can focus on ethicality/unethicality within organisations.

Third, managers and practitioners must understand the centrality of organisational communication, which may act as a buffer against unethical practices. Transparency in information sharing and two-way communication can help to foster ethical values within organisations. This has implications for designing organisational structures by suggesting that managers strategically design flatter structures to reduce the distortion of information.

Fourth, our study signals that unethical leadership is not a short-term phenomenon. At the core of this statement sits the concept of ethical culture, which develops gradually and becomes internalised over decades. Nevertheless, top managers can play a decisive role in aligning their organisations’ strategic maps with those organisations’ ethical considerations. Incorporating ethical facets into the organisational vision may, thus, provide leaders with a sense of direction in disseminating ethical values and achieving their vision.

Finally, our study highlights the role of institutional and cultural factors in influencing the perceptions and emergence of unethical leadership within organisations. This suggests implications at the policy level where the government is entrusted with establishing regulatory conditions to tackle unethical practices at the macro-level. In fact, such policy frameworks can be devised for various sectors of the economy, e.g. the public sector, private sector and NGOs.

The present study provides a systematic account of the academic literature regarding unethical leadership within organisations and offers important theoretical and practical implications for this field of inquiry. We first systematically unravelled the extant work on unethical leadership by providing important descriptive statistics about the yearly progression, theoretical rigour, choice of publication outlet, methodologies, including sampling techniques and unit of analysis, and geographic concentration/diffusion of unethical leadership research. Apart from these descriptive indicators, we also explored how, why and under what conditions unethical leadership is fostered and inhibited in organisational contexts. As a corollary, we developed themes that portray the mechanisms underlying the emergence of unethical leadership. We arranged these themes in the form of a framework that lucidly demonstrates the factors that contribute to its formation and the ways in which the emergence of unethical leadership results in varied types and levels of consequences. To that end, the present study identified the various levels at which unethical leadership research and practice can benefit. We proposed potential research questions pertaining to each level and urge scholars to utilise these questions to expand the existing theoretical and practical understanding of unethical leadership. While we noted a dearth of studies in general, the group and organisational levels appear particularly neglected. Given that contemporary work is increasingly organised around teams, our study advocates for additional investigations of unethical leadership at the group level. Furthermore, we point scholars towards the investigation of particular organisational interventions to reduce the emergence and impact of unethical leadership. Future researchers, finally, can work to empirically validate our well-grounded potential models. These models warrant future investigation at various levels of analysis to understand ways to curb unethical leadership at the macro-level and prevent its occurrence at the micro-level.

Limitations of the Study

The present study has systematically captured the practice of unethical leadership within organisations, identified knowledge gaps in the existing literature and provided relevant future research directions. Despite its contributions, however, our study entails some limitations, which future research should address. First and foremost, our literature search was confined to Scopus and the Web of Science databases. Although these databases include most of the reputed journals, we suspect that we may have missed some relevant and potentially useful studies. Therefore, future research can mine other databases to address this limitation. Second, following best practices, one of our screening criteria excluded various publication sources, such as conference proceedings, book chapters, thesis work and non-peer-reviewed journals. Future scholars can, thus, incorporate these sources in their work, including studies written in languages other than English. Finally, although systematic reviews are valuable, the method itself is not devoid of limitations. Therefore, future research should conduct meta-analyses to provide more robust and statistical support for our findings.

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Hassan, S., Kaur, P., Muchiri, M. et al. Unethical Leadership: Review, Synthesis and Directions for Future Research. J Bus Ethics 183 , 511–550 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05081-6

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Ethical leadership strengthens team efficacy and social cohesion.

Leading in an ethical way is more than simply ‘doing the right thing.’ Increasingly, ethical leadership is correlated with team performance—for instance, as this study shows, an ethically led team is better placed to bounce back from a period of poor performance

The Center for Innovative Leadership (CIL)  exists to support and accelerate the production of new research on leadership in today’s dynamic, complex organizations and bring research to life through engaging student experiences and powerful industry partnerships.

Summary: Under real-world pressures, teams, however well constituted, can hit periods of poor performance. When this happens, it is important the belief team members have in their collective ability—as well as their sense of psychological connectedness—remains strong, so that their performance can recover.

A team’s perception of its own efficacy and social integration impacts its level of performance. A new study finds that this relationship is moderated by the ethical stance of the team’s leadership. Ethical leaders can bolster a team’s belief in its efficacy and social integration to support a bounce back following poor performance. When leaders act less than ethically, this belief breaks down.

A fact of teamwork that we will all be familiar with is that when a team performs well, team members’ faith in their collective ability increases. Similarly, feelings of cohesion and social integration amongst the team also grows. This leads to the team setting high goals, successfully sustaining motivation toward those goals, and being able to adapt well to any negative feedback that should arise. The reverse is also true. When the team performs poorly, these factors are eroded and the ability to recover diminishes.

Put another way, high performance feeds confidence in the team’s abilities, promotes togetherness, and makes team membership desirable.  Poor performance on the other hand lowers expectations for the future. A sense of failure weakens members desire to associate with the team, threatens its ability to remain intact, and can lead to further poor performance. This perpetuating effect—whether on a ‘winning team’ or ‘losing team’—has obvious practical implications for long-term team effectiveness.

Ethical leadership in the field

A recent study from Sean R. Martin, a faculty affiliate of the Center for Innovative Leadership at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, in collaboration with Kyle J. Emich, Elizabeth J. McClean, and Col. Todd Woodruff, raises the question: how can team leaders enjoy the benefits of positive performance, while limiting the erosion of belief in team efficacy and social integration that occurs when performance dips? 

The researchers argue that ethical leadership can moderate the relationship between team performance and team efficacy beliefs, and between performance and the perceptions of psychological connectedness that foster social integration. Testing this theory in a field study of U.S. military teams actively engaged in competition, the research team found that ethical leadership helps ensure belief in team efficacy and social integration are maintained, even when their teams do not perform well.

Prior to this research several characteristics of ethical leadership have been shown in numerous studies to have a positive effect on the teams they lead. Ethical leaders act as role models, develop healthy ways of communicating that are fair and caring, while focusing on goals that define success not just by end results but also by how results were obtained. Ethical leaders set behavioral examples that encourage open communication, trust, and positive interpersonal relationships within their team.

Three connections: from ethics to efficacy 

There are three ways in which these characteristics of ethical leadership allow teams to better maintain their belief in team efficacy and team social cohesion:

• Emphasizing the means as well as the ends. Ethical leaders do not portray success solely in terms of winning or making money. They value good process and acting ethically in pursuit of a goal. This approach can influence team members to consider more than just ‘bottom line’ performance when they evaluate their work. If performance has been worse than expected, but the team has acted ethically in the eyes of an ethical leader, team members will see it as having still accomplished a great deal.
• Fostering two-way communication between leaders and followers. This creates a climate conducive to raising issues, suggesting ways to improve processes while also encouraging people to speak up about things that are going well. In this way ethical leaders make it more likely that their teams will identify causes of poor performance earlier.
• Building positive team relationships. Ethical leaders have the best interests of their teams in mind and prioritize building good relationships within their teams. They not only praise the positive aspects of team performance but also reassure team members that they can perform better in the future when things have not gone well. This helps head-off negative responses to poor performance ahead of time.

Ethical leadership, efficacy and belief

Team efficacy reflects team members’ beliefs and convictions about their collective ability to execute a given course of action, and their assessment of their collective ability to accomplish future tasks. Efficacy is important in that teams in which it is high set themselves higher goals and are more resilient in the face of difficulties. Efficacy beliefs are largely built on past experiences and influenced by judgments about meeting expectations based on the past. 

Ethical leadership, by emphasizing the means as well as the ends, and by encouraging learning and the ownership of processes, takes the focus away from purely objective assessments of performance outcomes. Ethical leaders, by setting goals related to values and to process and through their behavioral example, weaken the connection in team members’ minds between performance and their perceptions of efficacy.

Ethical leadership and social integration

Social integration reflects an interpersonal and affective component of team functioning. While performing poorly is a frustrating experience that people want to avoid, high performance engenders positive feelings toward oneself and one’s teammates. High-fives all round lead to greater social integration.

Ethical leadership—open communication, valuing processes in addition to outcomes, and establishing positive reciprocity in teams—also weakens the connection between performance and social integration, making team social interaction and integration less influenced by objective performance. 

By encouraging communication and identifying opportunities to improve, ethical leadership enables learning and a sense of ownership within teams. Valuing processes over outcomes enables team members to recognize each other’s contributions. Ethical and empathetic leaders, by modeling desirable behaviors, create climates that encourage trust and benevolence among team members—while setting them up to better navigate any dip in performance levels that may occur.

The Center for Innovative Leadership  (CIL) at the Carey Business School aims to advance knowledge and build capacity for innovative leadership in modern organizations. CIL is a hub for new ideas and insights on leadership, combining faculty-led research, student-facing programming, and community-focused impact.

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• v.7(4); 2021 Apr

Ethical leadership, corporate social responsibility, firm reputation, and firm performance: A serial mediation model

Nguyen thi thao nguyen.

a CFVG, University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam

Nguyen Phong Nguyen

b School of Accounting, University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam

Tu Thanh Hoai

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Data will be made available on request.

Due to globalization expansion, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is no longer an unfamiliar concept in emerging markets. In the case of Vietnam, its implementation will be influenced by several factors, including ethical leadership. Drawing upon the stakeholder theory, this study develops and tests a serial mediation model to explain how CSR and firm reputation can connect ethical leadership to enhanced firm performance. The PLS-SEM results from survey data collected from 653 mid- and top-level managers from large companies in Vietnam indicate that ethical leadership positively influences CSR, which, in turn, results in enhanced firm reputation and firm performance. This study contributes to research on the intersection between CSR and leadership in the context of emerging markets. This study also provides some managerial implications for Vietnamese firms striving to promote ethical leadership to achieve CSR outcomes.

Ethical leadership, corporate social responsibility, firm reputation, firm performance, Vietnam

1. Introduction

Ethical leadership refers to the values and acts of leadership that conform to ethical norms. It can be described as the display of proper social behavior through personal acts and interpersonal relationships and the encouragement of such conduct to followers in a two-way contact process ( Brown et al., 2005 ). The performance implications of ethical leadership have been widely examined in previous studies in Western countries (e.g. Angus-Leppan et al., 2010 ; Neubert et al., 2009 ; Shin et al., 2015 ; Eisenbeiss et al., 2015 ; Wang et al., 2017 ), which have suggested different pathways that link ethical leadership to firm performance. For example, Shin et al. (2015) claimed that ethical leadership enhances firm performance by promoting firm-level ethical and procedural justice climates. Another study by Wang et al. (2017) reported that ethical leadership contains humane leadership orientation, leadership accountability and sustainability orientation, which are conducive to organizational success.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is defined as a philosophy whereby businesses voluntarily incorporate social and environmental, ethical and human rights issues in their business activities and relationships with their stakeholders ( EC, 2011 ). Our review of the literature found that the connection between ethical leadership and CSR, as well as the focus of scholars on this topic, has been well documented ( Saha et al., 2020 ). However, how ethical leadership can become a firm's reputation and performance through CSR mechanisms has not been investigated, particularly in emerging markets where ethical issues continue to be a major concern. This gap must be bridged to provide significant implications for firms across emerging markets to initiate ethical leadership to maximise the impact of CSR activities towards enhancing firm effectiveness.

In response, we conducted our study in Vietnam, which is an increasingly important emerging market that has seen rapid economic growth and foreign investment. Vietnam represents an appropriate context for CSR as Vietnamese businesses are familiar with the concept. The benefits of CSR are diverse and significant for corporate governance and future development. CSR is a tool that enables businesses to establish a positive corporate image both externally and internally, which maximises profit and enhances their competitive advantage. In Vietnamese business practice, corporations previously had to implement CSR because of exporting requirements from Western companies. However, many Vietnamese companies now realize that domestic customers are becoming more concerned about corporations’ responsibilities and that CSR could make their business more sustainable and provide them with more competitive advantages. On the other hand, Vietnamese businesses are under pressure because the country is gradually losing its competitive edge; therefore, they urgently need to find another advantage to strengthen their position and access more global opportunities.

However, Vietnamese businesses are not actively involved in sustainable growth, as current corporate operations are still motivated by profitability ( Vuong et al., 2021 ). Moreover, the lack of practicality in the current studies, in addition to the lack of studies in this field in Vietnam, indicate an immediate demand for more rigorous research to which companies and CSR practitioners can refer. As we aim to explore the moderated mediation model between ethics, CSR, firm credibility and firm results, this study is important for CSR advocates.

This study will investigate whether two important areas of ethical leadership and CSR are interwoven to foster firm reputation and firm performance in Vietnam. Firm reputation is the public's impression and evaluation of how a company conducts its business ( Gotsi and Wilson, 2001 ). Firm performance should be measured organizationally in terms of both financial and operational efficiency ( Venkatraman and Ramanujam, 1986a , Venkatraman and Ramanujam, 1986b ). The research question focuses on whether CSR and firm reputation serially mediate the effect of ethical leadership and firm performance. The rationale of the mediating effects is as follows: the employees' views of the environment of their work unit, including CSR values, may be affected by whether they consider the leader to be ethical ( Choi et al., 2015 ). An ethical working environment would promote employee engagement and assist ethical leaders with corporate decision-making. All these outcomes can impact a company's reputation and bottom-line performance.

The rest of this paper is structured as follows: the theoretical background and research model with the corresponding hypotheses are provided in the next section; the data collection, design and sampling methods are then explained; the results of the research are then discussed; and the study concludes with the theoretical and managerial implications and conclusions of the papers.

2. Theoretical background and hypothesis development

2.1. ethical leadership and csr.

Ethics refers to a set of rules and principles that guide humans' conduct ( Johnstone and Crock, 2012 ). Ethical behavior could be simply defined as a strong connection between the concepts of right, proper, and fair ( Hosmer, 1987 ). On the other hand, a community's ethical behavior is generally shaped by each country's legal and regulatory systems ( Harrison, 1988 ). The connection between ethics and leadership is naturally created because it is often considered a significant component of gaining happiness and blessing ( Levine and Boaks, 2014 ). Accordingly, associated with ethics, ethical leadership refers to an individual who models behaviors that significantly influence groups or group members to encourage and guide them toward achieving a common goal ( Mendonca and Kanungo, 2006 ). They are conscientious persons who follow on beliefs and ideologies and include the capabilities to contribute to society's growth ( Maak and Pless, 2006 ). According to Bowie (2000) , ethical leaders should never evaluate their people only by their contributions and personality. Ethical leadership is characterized as modeling definitionally appropriate behavior through individual acts and interpersonal relations and encouraging team members' behavior through two-way dialogue, support and guidance, and decision-making ( Brown et al., 2005 ). Definitionally appropriate behavior represents the moral aspect of ethical leaders who embody admirable qualities such as integrity, reliability, and trustworthiness by taking responsibility for their decisions, including using a sufficient incentive and penalty system to encourage ethical behaviors and eliminate unethical behaviors; and also to discipline employees responsible for their actions ( Piccolo et al., 2010 ; Brown et al., 2005 ). Even though ethics has not always been considered an essential characteristic of leadership, this perception gradually changes. Ethic leadership is becoming a distinct leadership style, different from other leadership styles, such as spiritual leadership, authentic leadership, and transformational leadership. Ethical leadership can also be used as an analytical tool to explain certain behaviors' effectiveness and predict what behaviors will be effective in certain contexts ( Brown et al., 2005 ).

Based on conceptual explanations of ethical leadership, it is proven that a connection between ethical leadership and CSR exists in terms of business ethics and corporate growth. According to Ciulla (2005) commented on ethical leadership; it is ethical by being effective. If change is required and necessary, the achievement of the appropriate outcome is ethical at that time.

According to Prout (2006) , social responsibility is defined by the capacity to grow stakeholder's wealth, increase workers performance productivity, enhance living standards as well as share the earned values with local society. Similarly, CSR is defined as a philosophy that integrates company activities, activities and relationships between stakeholders ( EC, 2011 ). According to Freeman's stakeholder theory (1988), if an organization devotes its energy to stakeholders' issues, all individuals who are influenced by the organization's decisions, then the profit will be made. CSR could be simply explained as the companies' critical conduct and responsibility for local performing business's relative consequences. Beyond the profit, a CSR-engaged company will consider both the favorable and unfavorable implications of three key elements, including society, environment, and economy ( Marsden, 2001 ). These definitions indeed illustrate the close relationship between CSR and corporate management. In the stakeholder theory, leadership's role in serving its stakeholders' interests supports the connection between leadership and CSR.

According to Hind et al. (2009) , CSR initiatives are regularly approached in the wrong way or driven into PR and window dressing. There are no effective CSR implementations without leadership support at all levels ( Knippenberg and de Jong, 2010 ). Simultaneously, ethical leaders will seek to strengthen their environmental, social, and ethical efficiency to fulfill stakeholders' needs. The response of business leaders to CSR initiatives may be influenced by stakeholders' evolution regarding CSR ( Morsing and Schultz, 2006 ). In practice, numerous criminal cases involving corporations show that, even when CSR is working well, they may still commit criminal acts that violate the business's ethics. In such cases, the cause was not always misconceptions about CSR but was the negligence of unethical leaders. In contrast, ethical leadership helps followers care about stakeholders' interests beyond their own, and fosters a sense of corporate social responsibility ( Choi et al., 2015 ). Ethical leadership also emphasizes transparency, accountability and dignity, as well as a desire to do what is right and beneficial to CSR activities ( Angus-Leppan et al., 2010 ). In light of the above reasonings, we propose the following hypothesis.

Ethical leadership has a positive effect on CSR.

2.2. CSR and firm reputation

Firm reputation is defined as the overall perceptual characteristics drawn from its history and attributed to the firm as a predictable indicator of its future performance compared with its competitors ( Lange et al., 2011 ; Walker, 2010 ). Firm reputation is perceived as a valuable immaterial property that can be strengthened or ruined by the organizational decision to participate or ignore CSR practices and disclosures ( Shim and Yang, 2016 ). Firm reputation reflects two essential intangible assets which can differentiate firm from their rivals. The first one is the impossibility to imitate. The second one is the capability to attract more assets and people ( Surroca et al., 2010 ). Furthermore, corporate reputation has also been described as a pledge of the firm's capacity to fulfill stakeholders' interests ( Beheshtifar and Korouki, 2013 ), which is similar to the aim of CSR implementations.

On the other hand, as Shapiro (1983) stated, the firm's reputation is as healthy as its unique products and services. In addition to the quality of the firm's offerings, CSR is considered to be a significant factor in shaping a firm's reputation ( Worcester, 2009 ). CSR-engaged businesses can enhance their image in the local community, contributing to enhancing the competitive position in their business sectors ( Jorge et al., 2015 ).

The firm's CSR engagement level also parallels employee commitment, strengthening the firm's reputation ( Stawiski et al., 2010 ). This relationship has motivated many researchers to clarify the positive relevance of different perspectives ( Lai et al., 2010 ; Stanaland et al., 2011 ). Some research found a positive relationship in customers' eyes ( Lai et al., 2010 ; Stanaland et al., 2011 ), while others are from employees' perspectives ( Stawiski et al., 2010 ). Based on the evidence mentioned, the following hypothesis can be formed.

CSR has a positive effect on firm reputation.

2.3. Firm reputation and firm performance

According to economist Milton Friedman, business's primary purpose is to maximize profits while serving its owners and stakeholders (e.g., shareholders, employees, and customers). Therefore, guaranteeing financial output is the most practical measurement for corporate performance. Corporate image can increase customers' expenditure and make them more loyal to the corporation ( Bhattacharya and Sen, 2003 ), positively affecting corporate performance. In the long-term development journey, increased firm reputation leads to more extraordinary business results ( Chong, 2009 ). Firm credibility is a dependable indicator of customer satisfaction and customer retention ( Nguyen and Leblanc, 2001 ). Likewise, Awang and Jusoff (2009) also found that firm reputation significantly affects establishing a competitive advantage that differentiates it from its competitors.

Consequently, firm reputation will gradually be enhanced, followed by an increase in sales volume, a competitive advantage, and, finally, a higher level of firm performance. Besides, supporting research shows the decisive relevance of firm reputation and firm performance, both financially and non-financially ( Black et al., 2000 ; Pham and Tran, 2020 ; Sabate and Puente, 2003 ). Under such circumstances, the following hypothesis can be established.

Firm reputation has a positive effect on firm performance.

2.4. CSR and firm performance

Behaving unethically is a crucial problem because it can be financially detrimental to the entire organization ( Collins, 2009 ; Jensen, 2017 ). This statement means that ignoring business ethics can negatively affect company performance. As stated by Garriga and Melé (2013) , throughout the history of developmental economics, CSR has been seen as vital to achieving economic goals and prosperity. CSR involvement in business enhances firms' values, even in controversial industries ( Cai et al., 2012 ). The relationship between the two variables was even stronger in sensitive industries ( Reverte, 2012 ). In the direct approach, it has been argued that CSR decreases firms' cost of equity ( Chava and Purnanandam, 2010 ; Dhaliwal et al., 2011 ; El Ghoul et al., 2011 ) and cost of debt ( Chava and Purnanandam, 2010 ; Goss and Roberts, 2011 ). Environmental responsible initiatives can reduce operating costs, leading to improved financial results ( DiSegni et al., 2015 ). In addition to waste minimization, sustainable corporate growth has a significant effect on productivity. It is closely linked with CSR stakeholders' satisfaction ( Khaleel et al., 2017 ). CSR-engaged businesses strategically keep improving their image and build outstanding ties with shareholders that effectively improve their business performance ( McWilliams and Siegel, 2001 ; Turban and Greening, 1997 ; Davis, 1973). The longer-lasting social-organizational relationship built from CSR activities encourages the customers’ willingness to purchase goods and services offered by companies engaging in CSR ( Dobers and Halme, 2009 ). Higher firm reputation leads to higher financial performance ( Roberts and Dowling, 2002 ; Suresh et al., 2001 ).

In the indirect approach, CSR has a strong influence on employees' involvement and corporate risk management. CSR activities' engagement helps establish a stable association between employees and the company that significantly raises staff loyalty and increases firm performance progressively ( De Roeck et al., 2014 ). The CSR-implemented companies purposely progress their workforce to satisfy their desire for long-term sustainable growth ( Zhu et al., 2014 ). First, CSR bonds the affiliation between employees and corporations, which encourages increased employee productivity and commitment and, as a result, also increases corporate performance ( Zhou, 2016 ). Furthermore, CSR involvement in corporate strategy is advantageous in attracting talent ( Lim and Greenwood, 2017 ). Second, CSR activities are mostly published ( Dhaliwal et al., 2011 ); consequently, they increase corporate transparency. With greater transparency in stakeholder communication, there is greater control in firm risk management. The substantial risk from various financial, social, and environmental crises can be reduced to secure the firm's cash flow ( Sharfman and Fernando, 2008 ). Several papers have followed the line of sustained argumentation for the relationship between CSR and firm performance (e.g., Alafi and Al Sufy, 2012 ; Galbreath and Shum, 2012 ; Luo and Bhattacharya, 2006 ; Margolis and Walsh, 2003 ; Pham and Tran, 2020 ; Rehman et al., 2020 ; Rowley and Berman, 2000 ). All available evidence supports the following hypothesis.

CSR has a positive effect on firm performance.

CSR and firm reputation serially mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and firm performance.

The proposed model and corresponding hypotheses are shown in Figure 1 .

The proposed model and hypotheses.

3. Research methodology

In this study, the scope of data collection was limited to two industries: manufacturing and services. Furthermore, because of the media visibility of CSR operations in large enterprises, the sample was limited to large enterprises ( Graafland et al., 2003 ). The larger the business, the more money is devoted to corporate responsibility activities compared to small and medium enterprises ( Fifka and Pobizhan, 2014 ). As defined in the Vietnamese Government's Decree 56 ND-CP, a large manufacturing enterprise is required to have more than VND 100 billion in its capital account or more than 300 permanent employees. The capital required for the service sector amounts to more than VND 50 billion or over 300 full-time workers.

In this study, the target respondents were mid- and top-level managers of qualified firms because of their significant role in their strategic growth ( Hansen et al., 2008 ). According to previous studies (e.g., Hansen et al., 2008 ; Wei et al., 2019 ), these managers represent their companies in answering survey questionnaires. Moreover, the managerial levels would be fully aware of the performance outcomes of organizational strategies. A complex and systematic approach determined potential respondents. Using LinkedIn, the globally professional networking website ( Mintz and Currim, 2013 ), the first sampling frame was built. Collecting professional emails through LinkedIn is common in academic papers (e.g., Mintz and Currim, 2013 ; Ouakouak and Ouedraogo, 2017 ). Despite this approach's time-consuming nature, numerous advantages make it worthwhile: cost-saving, rapidity of recruiting, approachability to the information source, and the possibility to access a diversified sample ( Stokes et al., 2019 ). LinkedIn provides the possibility to approach potential respondents living all over Vietnam. Therefore, the sampling scope was composed of professionals who have visible details on their LinkedIn profile, such as the workplace, email address, and management job titles. The survey had been approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam). All participants provided informed consent at the commencement of the survey, and all their responses remained completely anonymous.

Of the 9,940 LinkedIn users on the invitation list, 1,428 respondents shared their opinions through an online survey. The eligibility of respondents and the completeness of survey forms were all double-checked. After examining the validation of responses, 418 incomplete answers, 193 answers from trading companies, and 164 from small companies were discarded. A further verification via email was done for the remaining 653 profiles. The number of verified respondents who had used their email was much higher than those who had used their company one, 551 and 102, respectively. Subsequently, a callback was conducted by directly calling or emailing 100 (or 18%) personal-email users to confirm their affiliation with the company. Only 13 out of the 100 callbacks were no longer attached to the company disclosed on their LinkedIn profile, which resulted from job switching. However, it is confirmed that their responses relied on their practical experiences in the former company. Acknowledging that the unit of analysis is at the firm scale, a strategic scanning process was taken on multiple responses to prevent duplicate responses from the same organization. Following Brislin (1970) , the English version questionnaire was initially written. Then the forward and backward translation method was applied to convert it into a Vietnamese version. The translation process was performed by two language professionals who are proficient in both English and Vietnamese. The translation was then proofread and rechecked by managers and academics before distributed to potential participants via Survey Monkey, a web-based survey tool.

This study uses well-established scales in the literature to measure the main constructs. The evaluation scales applied in this paper can be seen in Table 2 . The scale of ethical leadership is a ten-item scale adopted from Brown et al. (2005) , while CSR was assessed by a 17-item scale proposed by Wu et al. (2015) . In addition, this study rated corporate reputation using the scale of Fombrun et al. (2000) and Rettab et al. (2009) .

Table 2

Scale items and latent variable evaluation.

It was not easy to find objective firm performance data in Vietnam; therefore, a subjective self-evaluation measure was used. The self-evaluation measure of performance has been widely applied in earlier business ethics studies (e.g., Wei et al., 2019 ) and marketing (e.g., Hansen et al., 2008 ). It is argued that there is a robust positive correlation between self-evaluation and objective firm performance measures ( Venkatraman and Ramanujam, 1986a , Venkatraman and Ramanujam, 1986b ). This study measured firm performance following Fornell (1992) and Morgan and Piercy (1998) . Participants were asked to rank their firm performance over the last three years compared to key competitors. There was a different number of response categories for each rating scale. Both firm reputation and firm performance had six items, while ethical leadership and corporate social responsibility were ten and seventeen. Except for the verbal anchor of firm performance, which was from poor to excellent, other designs were from strongly disagree to strongly agree. To diminish common method bias, different scale endpoints were consciously designed ( Podsakoff et al., 2003 ).

As mentioned previously, this survey applied different measures for the various variables referred to as the theoretical framework. The relations between these constructs did not need to be clarified by the respondents. The theoretical relationships between variables, including ethical leadership, CSR, firm reputation, and firm performance, were examined through statistical methods. With this study's context and structure, the survey was effective and convenient, producing higher quality data.

4. Research results

4.1. sample characteristics.

Table 1 presents the characteristics of the sampled firms. As can be seen in Table 1 , the sample is spread across different industry sectors. Of 653 acceptable samples, 62.17% were services firms, and 37.83% were manufacturing firms. These figures reflect the service-oriented trend in the Vietnamese sector structure, in which the services industry accounts for 41% of Vietnam's GDP ( Deloitte, 2020 ). In terms of ownership structure, 70.44% of sample firms were foreign-invested enterprises; 29.56% are businesses without foreign ownership capital. In terms of firm size as measured by the owned asset, 80.77% of examined samples were firms with assets over 200 VND billion, while most were firms with assets over 1,000 VND billion (48.70%) Regarding firm size, as measured by the number of employees, 27.56% of samples were firms with 301–1,000 full-time staff, and 24.66% were firms with 1,001–5,000. In third place is 20.98 percent of companies with 101–300.

Table 1

Characteristics of sample firms (n = 653).

4.2. Assessment and refinement of the measurement model

At first, the measurement model was examined for reliability and validity. As shown in Table 2 , the outer loadings and the corresponding t-bootstrap values resulted from the test are acceptable and highly reliable. The outer loadings of all observed variables range from 0.59 to 0.92, exceeding the 0.50 limit ( Hulland, 2012 ). Consistent with this, all the equivalent t-bootstrap values fall within the statistical significance range of 19.80 and 125.52, much greater than 1.96. In addition, the convergent validity fulfilled expectations because the average variance extracted (AVE) values for all constructs are over the cutoff value of 0.50, within the range of 0.63 and 0.79. The composite reliabilities (CR) of the latent variables range from 0.95 to 0.97, surpassing the satisfactory standards for exploratory research (Kline, 2016).

Discriminant validity was assessed using Fornell and Larcker’s (1981) proposed procedure. As stated in Table 3 , except for all the control variables, the square roots of AVE of the critical constructs (ranging from 0.79 to 1.00) are all over the equivalent bootstrapped correlation coefficients. Furthermore, the majority of correlation coefficients are determined to be consistently lower than the acceptance value of 0.70, while no single correlations (ranging from -0.10 to 0.85) are larger than their composite reliabilities (ranging from 0.95 to 0.97). These pieces of evidence affirm the eligibility discriminant validity of the main constructs. The Heterotrait–Montrait (HTMT) test was also used ( Henseler et al., 2014 ). The test results in the HTMT values are within the range of 0.03 and 0.89, which is below 1.00, consequently, stronger supporting the discriminant validity (see Table 4 ).

Table 3

Discriminant validity analysis.

Notes: 1 st value = correlation between variables (off diagonal); 2 nd value (italic) = HTMT ratio; bold diagonal: square root of AVE; ∗, ∗∗: correlation is significant at the 5% and 1% levels, respectively, (two-tailed t-test).

Hypothesis testing results.

Notes : EL: Ethical leadership; CSR: corporate social responsibility; FR: firm reputation; PERF: firm performance; numbers in brackets: t -values; a, b, c denote significance at 10%, 5%, and 1% levels respectively (two-tailed t -test); LLCI = lower level of the 95% confidence interval; ULCI = upper level of the 95% confidence interval.

4.3. Hypothesis testing results

To test the posed hypotheses, three models were run. Model 1 had the direct effect of ethical leadership on firm performance; Model 2 was an augmentation of Model 1 with corporate social responsibility added as the mediating variable; and Model 3 was the full model with corporate social responsibility and firm reputation acting as two mediating variables in the relationship between ethical leadership and firm performance. H1 proposes that ethical leadership (EL) positively affects corporate social responsibility (CSR). Our analysis supports this hypothesis as the correlation between EL and CSR was positive and significant (β = 0.76; t-value = 44.15: Model 2; β = 0.76; t-value = 45.26: Model 3). H2, which conjectures that CSR positively influences firm reputation (FR), was confirmed as the CSR–FR relationship was positive and significant (β = 0.84; t-value = 61.50: Model 3). Our analysis also supports H3, which posits that FR has a positive effect on firm performance (PERF) (β = 0.59; t-value = 10.12: Model 3). H4 on the positive relationship between CSR and PERF was also confirmed (β = 0.38; t-value = 6.92: Model 2). This study also found that the addition of FR as the mediator in the relationship between CSR and PERF results in the insignificance of the CSR–PERF relationship (β = 0.09; t-value = 1.60: Model 3), suggesting that FR fully mediates the CSR–PERF link. To test H5 on the serial mediating effects of CSR and FR in the EL–PERF relationship, this study calculated the indirect impact of CSR and FR on the EL→CSR→FR→PERF path. The result shows that the indirect effect was significant (β = 0.29; t-value = 7.30: Model 3), and the confidence interval of the effect does not contain zero (LLCI = 0.23; ULCI = 0.38), supporting H5.

5. Discussion and implications

5.1. theoretical implications.

Given that several recent research papers address CSR's role in enhancing sustainable business (e.g., Samy et al., 2010 ; Sundström et al., 2020 ), the business environment's complexity and business capacity are inspiring more in-depth multi-dimensional studies. With the intention of expanding the literature of CSR, especially in the context of Vietnam, this study contributes empirical evidence by testing the mediating model of ethical leadership, CSR, firm reputation and firm performance. The findings show that the positive relationship among the four variables supports the hypotheses of the positive connections among previous studies' variables and provides a well-founded premise for further related studies. In doing so, our study responds to a call by Nguyen et al. (2018) for firms in Vietnam to understand how a Western phenomenon, such as CSR, is essential, meaningful and conceptualized for Vietnamese management.

As stated in the findings, the first hypothesis between ethical leadership and CSR was strongly positively clarified. It was determined that ethical leadership is essential to successfully implement CSR. Ethical leadership is believed to have a strong sense of CSR awareness and willingness to implement CSR; therefore, it results in high-quality CSR management and initiatives. In some contexts, the results responded to and consolidated the significance of ethical leadership in CSR implementation and employees’ CSR engagement, which is similar to previous studies (e.g., Angus-Leppan et al., 2010 ; Freeman, 1988 ; Knippenberg and de Jong, 2010 ; Levine and Boaks, 2014 ; Nejati et al., 2020 ). Our study results support Choi et al. (2015) , who found that the perceived ethical work environment encouraged supporters to have a moral work process by focusing on the well-being of the organization and reinforcing CSR through ethical leadership. In addition, our research included limited research on the CSR interface in emerging markets, such as the study by Pham and Tran (2020) , which found that CEO integrity played an important role in driving the efficacy of CSR disclosure.

Second, the findings clarified the positive connection between CSR and firm reputation. We determined that companies implementing a CSR strategy enhanced their reputation both internally and externally, which demonstrates the practical benefits of CSR for businesses, as mentioned in previous studies (e.g., Lai et al., 2010 ; Stanaland et al., 2011 ; Stawiski et al., 2010 ; Worcester, 2009 ). Therefore, the CSR–firm reputation relationship is relevant to Vietnam, as Vietnamese customers expect companies to set standards accordingly while complying with legislation and regulatory systems to minimise the negative social and economic consequences ( Huang et al., 2019 ).

The third hypothesis on the relationship between firm reputation and firm performance was determined to be positive in the findings. It was found that CSR activities' firm reputation positively affects firm performance in both financial and non-financial terms. By correctly implementing CSR, firms can convert their reputation into increased profit, talent and customers to establish a sustainable competitive advantage ( Black et al., 2000 ; Sabate and Puente, 2003 ; Sundström et al., 2020 ). Finally, the analysis showed a correlation between CSR and firm performance. According to the findings and increased firm reputation, CSR has other direct effects on firm performance. Suppose the firm's reputation attracts more customers and talent; in that case, CSR impacts talent and customer retention by increasing satisfaction. Furthermore, implementing CSR could strengthen firms' operating productivity and effectiveness ( Dhaliwal et al., 2011 ; Sharfman and Fernando, 2008 ; Zhou, 2016 ). Overall, the connection between CSR, firm reputation and firm performance, as explored in this study, will be a valuable reference for researchers who aim to study CSR in different contexts.

5.2. Practical implications

In addition to its theoretical implications, this study has several practical implications that offer interested parties an efficient, measurable CSR management tool. The findings show that ethical leadership plays an indispensable role in successfully implementing a CSR strategy. Corporate leaders must transform themselves into ethical leaders. To this end, leaders need to consider CSR as corporate social integration; therefore, they must develop a collaborative environment to remove the barriers to adopting CSR practices ( Saha et al., 2020 ).

Second, the way that CSR creates a firm reputation should be differentiated from other forms of marketing. This means that before designing and implementing a CSR strategy, companies must clearly understand the theoretical concept of CSR and how the approach works. CSR in Vietnam still means voluntary philanthropy or charitable donations. The definition of ‘CSR as added value’, where CSR is one of the main business goals and part of the corporate strategy, has not been completely understood or adopted. For example, CSR in Vietnam tends to be viewed as a simplistic approach that only considers customers and the community and frequently ignores the commitment of companies to enhance employee welfare ( Vuong et al., 2021 ). If businesses misunderstand the CSR concept, it will lead to improper actions and unfavourable outcomes. Additionally, CSR must be perceived by managers as an essential and indispensable component to be integrated into the business strategy of the company, including the consolidated cooperation of shareholders and top management. The proper distribution of resources should be regarded as an investment in a precious immaterial asset rather than solely a cost.

Third, because of the causal relationship between firm reputation and firm performance, companies will not achieve a sustainable goal and could weaken their competitive advantage if they implement a CSR strategy improperly; this problem is particularly relevant to large and multinational companies. Vinamilk, which is the largest Vietnamese dairy company, is a common example of gaining a competitive advantage due to a successful CSR strategy implementation. This company continually fulfils its product, environmental, capacity and social obligations. Although the company was in the business for half a century, it continues to gain and build profits because of its CSR practice and efforts.

Finally, the involvement of stakeholders in CSR implementation is necessary to enhance both firm reputation and firm performance. According to Slack et al. (2015) , the sense of responsibility, enthusiasm and CSR-objective-engagement of the workforce is essential to deliver CSR initiatives and succeed with CSR implementation. Additionally, the affiliation between the firm and employees and the employees' self-interest contributes to the firm performance. This is noteworthy since employees are the only ones who can profoundly understand their working methods and conditions ( DiMaggio and Powell, 1983 ). Accordingly, to attract attention and retain the stakeholders' involvement, the company's CSR strategy has to be simple, measurable and effective from the beginning. It is difficult to change and reform the mindset and working style of stakeholders and even more complicated and challenging if the stakeholders do not understand the meaning and efficiency of the company's CSR implementation. We suggest that the companies consider all their stakeholders while designing and implementing a suitable CSR strategy. If possible, the company should let the stakeholders contribute to the planning process, which is a straightforward approach to understanding their desires or constraints. Moreover, as mentioned above, it would be beneficial to start with small projects to test the reaction of the stakeholders, as this would remove obstacles and upgrade CSR activities.

5.3. Limitations and future research directions

We acknowledge that there are several limitations of this study. First, due to the various controversial theories and ideas related to the CSR concept, this study does not discuss or debate the correct method. Instead, it refers to theories to define all possible research areas. This approach is applied to all other multi-dimension concepts and norms that are used in this paper. We compensate for this through extensive research using official and reliable information sources and practical observance. Finally, the collected data from managers may contain subconscious biases, which could affect the results. This is because it could indicate the superficial perspective of the managers' position and not consider the other stakeholders.

Several opportunities derived from the above could be valuable suggestions for future studies of CSR. First, there are very few research papers that focus on Vietnamese case studies. Therefore, future studies could investigate other undiscovered or unpopular aspects of CSR or re-assess and expand this proposed research model to include an analysis of more practical case studies in Vietnam. Second, as the data sample is large in terms of the industry sector, this research model could be tested in a single industry sector that contributes to business practitioners in that area. Third, because the possible existence of psychological biases may occur in this paper, other researchers could test the hypotheses of this study from other stakeholders’ perspectives. Finally, the social and political environment has varied over time due to the development of the economy; therefore, it is crucial to undertake longitudinal research to gain more comprehensive information.

Declarations

Author contribution statement.

Nguyen Thi Thao Nguyen: Analyzed and interpreted the data; Contributed reagents, materials, analysis tools or data; Wrote the paper.

Nguyen Phong Nguyen: Conceived and designed the experiments; Contributed reagents, materials, analysis tools or data; Wrote the paper.

Tu Thanh Hoai: Analyzed and interpreted the data; Wrote the paper.

Funding statement

This work was supported by the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Data availability statement

Declaration of interests statement.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Additional information

No additional information is available for this paper.

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What is Research Ethics?

Originally published 1999-2013 at Resources for Research Ethics Education, a web project directed by Michael Kalichman, Ph.D., and Dena Plemmons, Ph.D., from the University of California-San Diego Research Ethics Program and the San Diego Research Ethics Consortium. Republished with permission.

See Also:   Teaching Research Ethics: Why Teach?

Research Ethics is defined here to be the ethics of the planning, conduct, and reporting of research.

It is clear that research ethics should include:

• Protections of human and animal subjects

However, not all researchers use human or animal subjects, nor are the ethical dimensions of research confined solely to protections for research subjects. Other ethical challenges are rooted in many dimensions of research, including the:

• Collection, use, and interpretation of research data
• Methods for reporting and reviewing research plans or findings
• Relationships among researchers with one another
• Relationships between researchers and those that will be affected by their research
• Means for responding to misunderstandings, disputes, or misconduct
• Options for promoting ethical conduct in research

For the purpose of this online resource, the domain of research ethics is intended to include nothing less than the fostering of research that protects the interests of the public, the subjects of research, and the researchers themselves.

Important Ethical Distinctions

In discussing or teaching research ethics, it is important to keep some basic distinctions in mind.

Prescriptive vs. descriptive claims

It is important not to confuse moral claims about how people ought to behave with descriptive claims about how they in fact do behave. From the fact that gift authorship or signing off on unreviewed data may be “common practice” in some contexts, it doesn’t follow that they are morally or professionally justified. Nor is morality to be confused with the moral beliefs or ethical codes that a given group or society holds (how some group thinks people should live). A belief in segregation is not morally justified simply because it is widely held by a group of people or given society. Philosophers term this distinction between prescriptive and descriptive claims the “is-ought distinction.”

Law vs. morality

A second important distinction is that between morality and the law. The law may or may not conform to the demands of ethics (Kagan, 1998). To take a contemporary example: many believe that the law prohibiting federally funded stem cell research is objectionable on moral (as well as scientific) grounds, i.e., that such research can save lives and prevent much human misery. History is full of examples of bad laws, that is laws now regarded as morally unjustifiable, e.g., the laws of apartheid, laws prohibiting women from voting or inter-racial couples from marrying.

It is also helpful to distinguish between two different levels of discussion (or two different kinds of ethical questions): first-order or “ground-level” questions and second-order questions.

First-order questions

First-order moral questions concern what we should do. Such questions may be very general or quite specific. One might ask whether the tradition of “senior” authorship should be defended and preserved or, more generally, what are the principles that should go into deciding the issue of senior authorship. Such questions and the substantive proposals regarding how to answer them belong to the domain of what moral philosophers call “normative ethics.”

Second-order questions

Second-order moral questions concern the nature and purpose of morality itself. When someone claims that falsifying data is wrong, what exactly is the standing of this claim? What exactly does the word “wrong” mean in the conduct of scientific research? And what are we doing when we make claims about right and wrong, scientific integrity and research misconduct? These second-order questions are quite different from the ground-level questions about how to conduct one’s private or professional life raised above. They concern the nature of morality rather than its content, i.e., what acts are required, permitted or prohibited. This is the domain of what moral philosophers call “metaethics” (Kagan, 1998).

Ways to Approach Ethics

Each of these approaches provides moral principles and ways of thinking about the responsibilities, duties and obligations of moral life. Individually and jointly, they can provide practical guidance in ethical decision-making.

Deontological ethics

One of the most influential and familiar approaches to ethics is deontological ethics, associated with Immanuel Kant (1742-1804). Deontological ethics hold certain acts as right or wrong in themselves, e.g., promise breaking or lying. So, for example, in the context of research, fraud, plagiarism and misrepresentation are regarded as morally wrong in themselves, not simply because they (tend to) have bad consequences. The deontological approach is generally grounded in a single fundamental principle: Act as you would wish others to act towards you OR always treat persons as an end, never as a means to an end.

From such central principles are derived rules or guidelines for what is permitted, required and prohibited. Objections to principle-based or deontological ethics include the difficulty of applying highly general principles to specific cases, e.g.: Does treating persons as ends rule out physician-assisted suicide, or require it? Deontological ethics is generally contrasted to consequentialist ethics (Honderich, 1995).

Consequentialist ethics

According to consequentialist approaches, the rightness or wrongness of an action depends solely on its consequences. One should act in such a way as to bring about the best state of affairs, where the best state of affairs may be understood in various ways, e.g., as the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain or maximizing the satisfaction of preferences. A theory such as Utilitarianism (with its roots in the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) is generally taken as the paradigm example of consequentialism. Objections to consequentialist ethics tend to focus on its willingness to regard individual rights and values as “negotiable.” So, for example, most people would regard murder as wrong independently of the fact that killing one person might allow several others to be saved (the infamous sacrifice of an ailing patient to provide organs for several other needy patients). Similarly, widespread moral opinion holds certain values important (integrity, justice) not only because they generally lead to good outcomes, but in and of themselves.

Virtue ethics

Virtue ethics focuses on moral character rather than action and behavior considered in isolation. Central to this approach is the question what ought we (as individuals, as scientists, as physicians) to be rather than simply what we ought to do. The emphasis here is on inner states, that is, moral dispositions and habits such as courage or a developed sense of personal integrity. Virtue ethics can be a useful approach in the context of RCR and professional ethics, emphasizing the importance of moral virtues such as compassion, honesty, and respect. This approach has also a great deal to offer in discussions of bioethical issues where a traditional emphasis on rights and abstract principles frequently results in polarized, stalled discussions (e.g., abortion debates contrasting the rights of the mother against the rights of the fetus).

An ethics of care

The term “ethics of care” grows out of the work of Carol Gilligan, whose empirical work in moral psychology claimed to discover a “different voice,” a mode of moral thinking distinct from principle-based moral thinking (e.g., the theories of Kant and Mill). An ethics of care stresses compassion and empathetic understanding, virtues Gilligan associated with traditional care-giving roles, especially those of women.

This approach differs from traditional moral theories in two important ways. First, it assumes that it is the connections between persons, e.g., lab teams, colleagues, parents and children, student and mentor, not merely the rights and obligations of discrete individuals that matter. The moral world, on this view, is best seen not as the interaction of discrete individuals, each with his or her own interests and rights, but as an interrelated web of obligations and commitment. We interact, much of the time, not as private individuals, but as members of families, couples, institutions, research groups, a given profession and so on. Second, these human relationships, including relationships of dependency, play a crucial role on this account in determining what our moral obligations and responsibilities are. So, for example, individuals have special responsibilities to care for their children, students, patients, and research subjects.

An ethics of care is thus particularly useful in discussing human and animal subjects research, issues of informed consent, and the treatment of vulnerable populations such as children, the infirm or the ill.

Casuistry or case study approaches

The case study approach begins from real or hypothetical cases. Its objective is to identify the intuitively plausible principles that should be taken into account in resolving the issues at hand. The case study approach then proceeds to critically evaluate those principles. In discussing whistle-blowing, for example, a good starting point is with recent cases of research misconduct, seeking to identify and evaluate principles such as a commitment to the integrity of science, protecting privacy, or avoiding false or unsubstantiated charges. In the context of RCR instruction, case studies provide one of the most interesting and effective approaches to developing sensitivity to ethical issues and to honing ethical decision-making skills.

Strictly speaking, casuistry is more properly understood as a method for doing ethics rather than as itself an ethical theory. However, casuistry is not wholly unconnected to ethical theory. The need for a basis upon which to evaluate competing principles, e.g., the importance of the well-being of an individual patient vs. a concern for just allocation of scarce medical resources, makes ethical theory relevant even with case study approaches.

Applied ethics

Applied ethics is a branch of normative ethics. It deals with practical questions particularly in relation to the professions. Perhaps the best known area of applied ethics is bioethics, which deals with ethical questions arising in medicine and the biological sciences, e.g., questions concerning the application of new areas of technology (stem cells, cloning, genetic screening, nanotechnology, etc.), end of life issues, organ transplants, and just distribution of healthcare. Training in responsible conduct of research or “research ethics” is merely one among various forms of professional ethics that have come to prominence since the 1960s. Worth noting, however, is that concern with professional ethics is not new, as ancient codes such as the Hippocratic Oath and guild standards attest (Singer, 1986).

Research Ethics

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• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8706-2698 Athula Sumathipala 1 , 2 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4841-5040 Oshini Sri Jayasinghe 2 , 3 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6352-2832 Buddhika Fernando 1 , 2
• 1 Keele University , Keele , UK
• 2 Institute for Research & Development in Health and Social Care , Battaramulla , Sri Lanka
• 3 Faculty of Health and Life Sciences , University of Liverpool , Liverpool , UK
• Correspondence to Oshini Sri Jayasinghe (also known as V P K Krishani Jayasinghe); krishanijayasinghe{at}gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1136/leader-2023-000901

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• public health
• patient involvement
• health system
• Social Justice

Introduction

Democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people, according to the ancient Greeks and Abraham Lincoln. Similarly, health research needs to be of low- and middle-income country (LMIC) people, by LMIC people and for people in LMICs, as well as of, by and for people in high-income countries (HICs).

Equitable partnerships in global health

There has been much written on equitable partnerships, recognising the importance in its own right, 3 4 as well as in ensuring sustainability, efficiency and yielding better outcomes. 5 One of the early writings on conducting ethical research in developing countries by Emanuel et al 6 emphasised the need for minimising exploitation and collaborative partnerships. More recent writing by Kumar et al discussed the systemic inequalities reinforcing inequities and the need for individual and institutional empowerment in combating such inequity. 7

Our experiences indicate three areas upon which equitable global health partnerships are built: equity in research, ethics as a mandatory requirement and community engagement and involvement (CEI).

The role of research in global health: bidirectional knowledge flows

We believe research is the way forward to address this inequity in global health. Research collaborations among HICs and LMICs can be the way forward to close the health, research and publication gap between Global North and Global South. 5 In the current context of the 10/90 (LMIC/HIC) divide in resource allocation, research funding and publications, as well as the disproportionate burden of diseases in LMICs, it can be challenging for LMICs to swim against the tide, particularly given the less well-developed research culture. 8

There is some evidence that research carried out in the Global South had significant impact also on the Global North, though the quantum of research is limited (ie, 6% of total global research output). 8 9 A clinical trial (1687 patients) conducted in South America, Africa and India 9 that demonstrated magnesium sulfate as the treatment of choice for eclampsia is an early example of how collaborations can provide answers to global health problems. Another classic example is the research carried out by Patel et al . 10 Before the findings of this study were disseminated, the WHO recommended syndromic management for vaginal discharge, where women were treated for some or all of five common reproductive tract infections, resulting in significant social cost through divorces due to mistrust among partners. 10 A third example is the research carried out by Rahman et al on delivering psychosocial interventions by community health workers for maternal depression in Pakistan. 11

The inequities in health research are to be exacerbated by modern trends in healthcare. For example, in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, AI draws conclusions and makes predictions based on the large healthcare databases it is trained on. The large, high-quality datasets required for training AI technologies are very limited in LMICs, so that the models and algorithms in AI usage will not function optimally for the under-represented people of LMICs. 12

Despite the significant efforts from HICs to boost global health research in the recent past, the distance that is yet to be travelled was indicated by the investigation the senior author of this article carried out on under-representation of LMICs in the research literature in 2023: excluding USA, UK and other Euro-American countries, contribution from the Rest of the World in the research literature amounted to 6.5% in 2000 and increased to 11.9% after 17 years. 8 9 13

Ethics in research as a key pillar in successful and equitable global health partnerships

Incorporating ethical practice into research should be an essential prerequisite of global health research, given the inequity in resource distribution as well as the concentration of new knowledge production belonging to a minority of HICs despite contributions from LMICs in that knowledge creation. Research is carried out in LMICs with the beneficial intent of promoting access to more advanced technology, knowledge, treatment and care; at the same time, it is also considered an opportunity to conduct clinical research, for example, in a location where it can be carried out at a lower cost and where legal and regulatory requirements are simpler. 6

Justice and fairness are key ethical aspects that needs to be considered in research in LMICs. There is a move towards ensuring fairness in research by mandating reporting on research fairness: the Research Fairness Initiative reporting areas require that research projects report on the fairness of opportunity (relevance to communities, fair research contracting, fair recognition of management capacities), fair process (minimising negative impact, fair local hiring and training, fair data ownership, and full cost recovery) and, lastly, on the fair sharing of benefits, costs and outcomes. 14 15

In a global health research context where the power differential is significant between HIC and LMIC partners, those from LMICs may become vulnerable. There should be respect for the autonomy and dignity of LMIC collaborating partners and their freedom of thought and action. LMIC partners should have an equal say in the collaboration. HIC partners need to respect the rights of LMIC partners and take necessary steps to provide support where the freedom of choice may be limited.

We identify five interconnected issues related to research that impact the level of equity in a global health partnership. These are matters that affect the research community in LMICs and need addressing independent of specific research projects.

Involving LMIC researchers throughout the research cycle

Priority and agenda setting based on funders’ or HIC partners’ requirements is arguably inevitable. 14 This, however, translates into issues of sustainability and effectiveness since these agendas do not always align with local needs and priorities where the research is carried out. What is certainly avoidable is the practice of limiting LMIC researchers to secondary roles (such as data gathering, gaining regulatory/ethical approvals, recruiting participants and operations management) while retaining the more scientific roles of research design, data analysis, research report generation and dissemination for HIC researchers. In our experience, what has invariably proven unsuccessful is the situation where HIC researchers arrive in LMICs with the research protocol written and instructing LMIC researchers to implement the research project. The most successful research was carried out in LMICs where the research was codesigned by HIC and LMIC co-investigators, with bidirectional knowledge sharing.

Strengthening capacity in LMICs and HICs

Capacity building should in our view be a requirement of any LMIC-related grant funding. An excellent case in point for demonstrating the value of capacity building is the establishment of a genetics laboratory at the Institute for Research and Development in Healthcare in Sri Lanka. While setting up the Sri Lanka Twin Registry Biobank in collaboration with researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College and the University of Sydney, there was some pressure to transfer the biological material to the UK/Australia for analysis due to the concern that it would take time to develop the necessary expertise in Sri Lanka. However, weighing the delay against the detrimental impact of LMIC researchers being relegated to mere data gatherers and losing the long-term benefits of developing capacity in Sri Lanka for genetic research, the HIC researchers supported the training and skill upgrading of the Sri Lankan team, leading to the highly successful genetic laboratory that today trains hundreds of Sri Lankans in genetic research ( www.ird.lk ).

Outputs: authorships, publications, presentations

Significant disparities in LMIC researchers receiving authorship, more notably as first or last authors, have been recorded. For example, a systematic review of authorship in collaborative health research in Africa revealed that there is low representation of authors from Africa in publications 16 ; where there was collaboration with a top US university, only 41% of all authors and 23% of first authors were from the country where the research was carried out. Furthermore, 13.5% of all papers had no local coauthor. In the same vein, Smith et al 17 pointed out that the power differential between HICs and LMICs in research collaborations is represented in unequitable distribution of authorships among collaborators. There is similar disparity in LMIC researchers having reduced opportunities for presentations and dissemination of findings.

In our experience, collaborative partnerships with HIC researchers can ensure equity in research outputs by fair sharing of authorship; the twin registry project previously mentioned resulted in a number of papers with Sri Lankan researchers as first author. More recently, a research on participation in genomic research was published with the Sri Lankan researcher as the first author and the HIC researcher as the senior author. 18

Funding structures and grant reviews

Grant reviews are usually carried out by HIC institutions, and LMIC researchers have limited input into the process. The systemic constraints of lack of administrative and financial capacity to meet the requirements of the grant application process for LMIC researchers are exacerbated by the limits placed on indirect costs for LMIC institutions. The practice of reimbursement also imposes difficulties on LMIC research institutions which lack the financial strength to fund a project up-front and wait for reimbursement. Again, we have encountered HIC institutions which have been understanding of these constraints, going the extra mile to change grant conditions to accommodate the realities of doing research in LMICs.

Data ownership, analysis and access

This is also an area of significant contention since some HIC institutions have a requirement that all data generated by the research vest in the HIC institution. This is sometimes in spite of the funders’ specific rule that data and the intellectual property generated belong to the place that generates it, evidently with the requirement to share access with all partners. For example, the Medical Research Council (MRC) UK Grant award conditions specify that the ‘ownership of all intellectual assets rests with the organisation that generates them’ 19 ; however, some UK intermediary institutions that administer grant collaborations have the condition that ‘all intellectual property… developed by any member of the staff of any of the Parties shall vest in the UK institution’. 20 This undermines equity in the partnership.

Community engagement and involvement

CEI, a key requirement for ethical research, simply means ‘research being carried out ‘with’ or ‘by’ members of the public rather than ‘to’, ‘about’ or ‘for’ them’. 21 CEI can occur throughout the research cycle; community members can, for example, participate in identifying research priorities, serve as members of advisory or steering groups, provide input on research design, contribute to the development of patient information materials, advise on patient recruitment strategies and help conduct interviews with research participants. Community members can also work with primary researchers as joint grant holders or coapplicants in research projects. This comprehensive involvement ensures that research aligns with community needs and fosters collaborative and impactful outcomes. In the global health context, CEI can also be framed as collaborative partnerships between the researcher and the local communities to involve them in addressing health needs. 22

Public accountability is essential since research relies on people, public resources and existing knowledge in the public domain. CEI ensures that public good results from research, though not necessarily immediately. CEI contributes to generating bidirectional mutual benefits for researchers and communities, and it is important in health and social care research since it drives social change by influencing stakeholders with government, political or funding power to implement public health projects and policies that primarily benefit communities. CEI is therefore an ethical obligation in the global health context, where ethics is a critical but supportive friend in research.

Achieving equity in health for all people worldwide is challenging in the current world. Collaborative research between the Global North and Global South can help navigate the challenges and barriers to equity in health. Such research collaborations should operate ethically as a ‘win-win situation’ for all stakeholders. Global health research should promote the public good and address the health priorities of both HICs and LMICs, with researchers accountable to the public. CEI is the way forward to ensure that research is sensitive to the needs of the populations (including vulnerable groups) and beneficial to communities in all parts of the world.

We therefore propose that these three essential pillars, (1) research, (2) ethics and (3) CEI, should be brought together as mandatory interconnected components of all global health research collaborations. We believe research excellence can only be achieved through a holistic approach, involving deep understanding, practice and capacity development in each of these three pillars.

As researchers originating from the Global South, our experience in collaborative work with institutions from the Global North over the past two decades has been that most researchers and organisations are very willing to go extra mile to ensure ethical, equitable and mutually beneficial partnerships between the Global North and the Global South. A case in point is the willingness many UK universities showed to amend research contracts to share ownership in data generated by research in the South, whereas archaic regulations required the Northern institutions to have sole ownership of data generated. In another situation, when the lack of ethical considerations in grant applications was pointed out to a major funding institution in the UK, they took measures to incorporate ethical review as a mandatory requirement in future funding calls. This is why we believe it is important to draw the attention of the research community towards ethics, research and CEI as the three fundamental pillars of successful global health collaborations.

Ethics statements

Patient consent for publication.

Not applicable.

Ethics approval

• ↵ NIH summary report on request for information on promoting equity in global health research . Fogarty International Center ; 2023 . Available : https://www.fic.nih.gov/News/Publications/Pages/nih-report-rfi-equity-global-health-research.aspx
• ↵ North-south research partnership academia meets development? IHEID . 2014 Available : https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/library/publications-institute/north-south-research-partnership-academia-meets-development
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Contributors AS and OSJ (VPKKJ) conceived the paper. AS developed the initial draft. OSJ and BF revised the drafts. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests None declared.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Ethical leadership and follower moral actions: investigating an emotional linkage.

• 1 School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
• 2 School of Business Administration, Guizhou University of Finance and Economics, Guiyang, China
• 3 School of Business and Administration, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China

The effectiveness of ethical leadership has been extensively investigated. However, compared to the outcomes of ethical leadership, we still lack enough knowledge about the mechanisms underlying ethical leadership and its outcomes. Drawing from social information processing theory, this paper explores an emotional explanation for the effectiveness of ethical leadership. Adopting a time-lagged research design with responses from 64 leaders and 289 followers, the present research found that ethical leadership invokes followers’ other-praising emotions and eventually enhances their moral actions. Further, leader core self-evaluation contributes to the positive effects of ethical leadership on followers’ other-praising moral emotions and subsequent moral actions. Theoretical and practical implementations of these observations were discussed.

Introduction

As ethical scandals are cropping up more frequently in recent times and in view of its unique effectiveness in modeling behavioral ethicality, ethical leadership is receiving greater research attention ( Brown and Treviño, 2006 ; Demirtas and Akdogan, 2015 ). Characterized as a leadership demonstrating and promoting of “normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relations” ( Brown et al., 2005 , p. 120), ethical leadership has been reported to have positive effects on a range of follower outcomes including task performance ( Bouckenooghe et al., 2015 ), perceived leader effectiveness ( Brown et al., 2005 ), organizational citizenship behavior ( Piccolo et al., 2010 ), work place deviance ( Resick et al., 2013 ), ethical behaviors ( Mayer et al., 2009 ), and prosocial behaviors ( Kalshoven et al., 2013 ). However, in spite of such empirical support, several researchers ( Brown and Treviño, 2006 ; Bouckenooghe et al., 2015 ) have noted that our understanding of ethical leadership and its impacts on follower actions need to be improved due to the following reasons.

First, in comparison to the numerous outcomes of ethical leadership, little is known about the mechanisms through which ethical leaders trigger followers’ moral actions. Although the relationship between ethical leadership and follower ethical/unethical behaviors has been investigated ( Mayer et al., 2009 ), we still lack enough research regarding why followers can translate their leaders’ ethical behaviors into their own moral actions, which is an equally essential part to understand ethical leadership effectiveness ( van Knippenberg et al., 2004 ; Dinh et al., 2014 ). Thus,without investigating the mechanisms that drive the influence of ethical leadership on follower moral actions, we would not reach a comprehensive understanding about the effectiveness of ethical leadership.

Second, several scholars ( Brown and Treviño, 2006 ; Chen and Hou, 2016 ; Zhang and Tu, 2016 ) have stressed the need to explore the boundary conditions of ethical leadership effectiveness. However, with few exceptions that had focused on follower characteristics such as self-esteem ( Avey et al., 2011 ) or team climate ( Chen and Hou, 2016 ), what mitigates or strengthens ethical leadership’s influence has remained undiscovered. Especially, little is known about whether and how the effectiveness of ethical leadership varies across different leader characteristics. Since paucity of information on the boundary conditions will limit the theoretical development and practical implications of ethical leadership ( Brown and Treviño, 2006 ; Chen and Hou, 2016 ), it is necessary to examine such conditions to fully understand ethical leadership at the workplace.

The present research aims to address the gaps mentioned above. First, we rely on social information processing theory (SIP, Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978 ) to examine a moral emotional linkage between ethical leadership and follower moral actions. The emotional mechanism has been widely considered to be necessary to understand leader behaviors and to predict employee behaviors ( Dasborough and Ashkanasy, 2002 ; Sadri et al., 2011 ). As in the moral domain, emotions consciously and unconsciously affect employees’ ethical behavior and ethical decision making ( Greene and Haidt, 2002 ; Arsenio and Lemerise, 2004 ; Salvador and Folger, 2009 ; Harvey et al., 2016 ). However, research on ethical leadership has so far paid more attention to cognitive mechanisms such as (cognitive) trust ( Xu et al., 2016 ), perceived accountability ( Steinbauer et al., 2014 ) and perceived organizational politics ( Kacmar et al., 2013 ), while research on leadership and business ethics has not done so with regard to the role that emotions play in employees’ reactions to ethical leadership ( Brown and Mitchell, 2010 ). Although scholars have emphasized the vital role of moral emotions in translating moral standards into moral actions (see a review of Tangney et al., 2007 ; Lindebaum et al., 2017 ), few studies, as far as we know, have empirically examined this relationship.

Drawing from social information theory ( Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978 ), which posits that environmental information cues shape individual’s attitudes and behaviors by indicating what a person’s attitudes and opinions should be, we propose that ethical leadership would invoke followers’ other-praising moral emotions, which eventually triggers followers to report more ethical issues and engage in less unethical behavior. Second, we believe that an ethical leader is more likely to evoke followers’ other-praising moral emotions when the leader has high core self-evaluation. Salancik and Pfeffer (1978) have pointed out that, as information cues become more salient, individual’s attitudes and behaviors are more likely to change. Hence, we believe that when an ethical leader has high core self-evaluation, he/she would be more confident about his/her own ethical beliefs and actions, making the ethical cues more salient to invoke followers’ other-praising moral emotions.

Our research contributes to ethical leadership and moral emotions literature in the following ways. First, by linking ethical leadership with follower moral actions through moral emotions, our research provides a fundamentally emotional explanation of why ethical leadership promotes follower moral actions. Second, by focusing on other-praising moral emotions, our research discusses how emotions in specific-domain (i.e., moral domain) can help explain the effectiveness of ethical leadership, thus contributing new insights to emotion literature. Finally, by examining the moderating role of leader core self-evaluation, the present research clarifies the potential boundary condition of ethical leadership effectiveness. Our theoretical framework is shown in Figure 1 .

FIGURE 1. Theoretical model.

Theory and Hypotheses

Individual’s job attitudes and behaviors are results of complex processes. Previous research has emphasized the vital role of need-satisfaction models in shaping employee’s job attitudes and behaviors. For example, Maslow (1943) proposed the hierarchy of needs model to explain how different needs guide individual’s specific behaviors. However, taking the social information processing perspective, Salancik and Pfeffer (1978) argue that the context and the consequences of past choices significantly influence individuals’ attitudes and behaviors, which go beyond the effects of individual predispositions and rational decision-making processes. Specifically, as social information processing theory posits, individual perceptions, attitudes and behaviors can be shaped by information cues, such as work requirements and expectations from the social environment ( Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978 ; Bhave et al., 2010 ). Specifically, Gundlach et al. (2003) indicated that individuals’ translating of information cues could trigger individuals’ emotional reacts. For example, employees may experience anger emotion if they translate others’ whistle-blowing behavior to responsibility avoidance behavior. Meanwhile, several scholars have emphasized the vital role of emotion in processing information cues and in translating those cues into moral judgment and actions (e.g., Arsenio and Lemerise, 2004 ; Dodge and Rabiner, 2004 ).

According to SIP theory, one of the important sources of information is individuals’ immediate social environment, which has two general effects on individuals’ attitudes and behaviors ( Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978 ). First, individuals’ social environment helps construct meaning directly through the guidance of socially acceptable beliefs, needs, attitudes, and reasons impinging on actions ( Bhave et al., 2010 ). For example, leaders’ continuous statements about ethical standards and principles underlying work conditions force employees to either reject such statements or include them during employees’ own evaluations. Second, social influence and context focus individuals’ attention on certain specific information, which makes the information more salient, raises expectations, and highlights the logical consequences of individual behaviors ( Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978 ). For example, coworkers may highlight the bad or unhealthy effects of their products to customers and state that their work was unethical when judged against the prevailing social norms.

According to social information processing theory, such environmental information cues help employees to construct and interpret events and shape their attitudes and behaviors by indicating what a person’s attitudes and opinions should be ( Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978 ). Previous research has validated the work-related outcomes explained by SIP theory, such as procedural justices ( Goldman, 2001 ), job satisfaction ( O’Reilly and Caldwell, 1985 ), work-family conflict ( Bhave et al., 2010 ), as well as leadership effectiveness ( Chiu et al., 2016 ).

Ethical Leadership and Other-Praising Moral Emotions

Ethical leadership is conceptualized as the “demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making” ( Brown et al., 2005 , p. 120). First, ethical leaders get legitimized by modeling normatively appropriate behaviors such as honesty, fairness and care. Second, ethical leaders not only pay attention to ethics themselves, but they also take specific actions to make ethics salient in the social environment, say, by communicating with followers about ethics, allowing followers to speak up their ideas or opinions ( Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999 ), setting ethical standards and rewarding ethical conduct ( Treviño et al., 2003 ). Finally, ethical leaders embed ethicality into their decision-making process by considering the ethical consequences of their decisions and making fair choices as a model for others ( Bass and Avolio, 2000 ). Multiple studies have suggested that ethical leadership predicts followers’ work attitudes and behaviors, such as job satisfaction ( Brown et al., 2005 ), psychological well-being ( Avey et al., 2012 ), performance ( Bonner et al., 2016 ), employee voice ( Lee et al., 2017 ), OCB ( Bonner et al., 2016 ; Wang and Sung, 2016 ) and misconduct ( Mayer et al., 2010 ).

Moral emotions refer to the emotions that are linked to the “interests or welfare of society or at least of persons other than the judge or agent” ( Haidt, 2003 : 854), which typically include self-conscious emotions such as shame and guilt, other-condemning emotions such as anger and disgust, and other-praising emotions such as elevation and gratitude ( Brown and Mitchell, 2010 ). Moral emotions have been thought to play a vital role in linking moral standards and moral behaviors ( Tangney et al., 2007 ) because those emotions provide the motivational force (i.e., the power and the energy) for individual to do good and to avoid doing bad ( Kroll and Egan, 2004 ). However, with very few exceptions that focus on the trait qualities of moral emotions (e.g., Eisenbeiss and Knippenberg, 2015 ), researchers have not empirically examined how the state qualities of moral emotions can help to explain the linkage between moral standards and moral behaviors.

In present research, we focus on other-praising moral emotions to answer how followers translate ethical leadership into their own moral behaviors. Other-praising moral emotions refer to the emotions that are positive and other-targeted, such as elevation, gratitude, and awe ( Brown and Mitchell, 2010 ). We emphasize the mediating role of other-praising moral emotions for two reasons. First, ethical leaders stick to high ethical standards when making decisions ( Lee et al., 2017 ), which will be more likely to invoke followers’ positive rather than negative moral emotions. Second, through communicating with followers about ethical issues and responding to followers’ suggestions, ethical leaders will be more possible to evoke followers’ leader-targeted rather than self-targeted moral emotions, such as elevation and gratitude.

Drawing on social information processing theory, we believe employees’ moral emotions and moral behaviors can be shaped by the ethical information cues (e.g., values, standards and behaviors) exhibited by their direct leader ( Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978 ). Specifically, we propose that ethical leadership will evoke followers’ other-praising moral emotions due to the following reasons. First, we anticipate that ethical leadership can invoke follower moral emotions (e.g., elevation, inspiration) because ethical leaders express strong ethicality in their behaviors. Since the direct leader is one of the most important components of work environment for employees ( Bass and Stogdill, 1990 ), the beliefs and behaviors of the direct leader provide the salient information cues that are capable of progressively changing employee attitudes and behaviors. Since ethical leaders exhibit high ethical beliefs and behaviors, followers will translate leaders’ ethical values and behaviors into their own feelings, e.g., generating the other-praising emotions such as elevation and awe.

Second, ethical exemplars encourage followers to praise moral emotions (e.g., elevation, awe) by demonstrating the desire for being just and helping others. Having been characterized thus as moral persons, ethical leaders start being seen not only as fair and principled decision-makers in organizations but also moral examples who care about the broader society ( Brown and Treviño, 2006 ). By demonstrating self-sacrifice and self-transcendence ( Mayer et al., 2012a ), ethical leaders can easily invoke followers’ other-praising moral emotions. For example, when Martin Luther King was giving the famous speech “I Have a Dream”, the audience became charged with moral emotions such as elevation, inspiration, and awe. Third, ethical leaders elicit followers’ praising moral emotions (e.g., gratitude, inspiration) by taking care of followers’ needs and welfare. Haidt (2003) argued that, when an individual perceives that another person has done some good deeds for him/her, he/she will experience the emotion of gratitude. Thus, by continuously considering followers’ needs, ethical leaders will easily evoke praising moral emotions among their followers ( Cropanzano et al., 2017 ).

Although the association between ethical leadership and followers’ other-praising moral emotions have not been directly examined, several previous findings could be seen to be providing supportive evidence for our proposed relationship. For example, Vianello et al. (2010) found that leaders’ self-sacrificing and interpersonal fairness elicited followers’ elevation. Similarly, Haidt (2003) pointed out that kindness and self-sacrifice are powerful elicitors of awe and elevation emotion. Therefore, we propose that:

Hypothesis 1: Ethical leadership is positively related to other-praising moral emotions.

Other-Praising Moral Emotions and Moral Actions

The association between individual emotions and behavioral reactions has received much attention over the past few decades ( Cropanzano et al., 2017 ; Lebel, 2017 ). For example, as cognitive appraisal theory posits ( Lazarus, 1991 ), each discrete emotion predicts a specific action tendency ( O’Leary-Kelly et al., 2017 ), e.g., anger predicts attack, compassion predicts helping, and anxiety predicts avoidance. In the moral emotion domain, although the linkage between each moral emotion and the specific behavioral tendency has not been fully revealed, research has made much progress in predicting behaviors via moral emotions. For example, Cropanzano et al. (2017) proposed that other-condemning moral emotions (anger, disgust, and contempt) invoked by leader-member exchange (LMX) differentiation will harm the LMX relationship in the future.

Since moral emotions are linked to the interests or welfare of society or of persons, moral actions will be more likely to become its behavior tendencies. As Kroll and Egan (2004) noted, moral emotions provide the motivational force—the power and energy—to do good and to avoid doing bad. In the present research, we propose that other-praising moral emotions positively affect followers’ moral actions to report unethical issues and to avoid doing unethical behaviors. First, other-praising moral emotions provide followers with more psychological power and energy to engage in moral actions ( Kroll and Egan, 2004 ). Haidt (2003) pointed out that other-praising moral emotions (e.g., elevation and awe) “create a more generalized desire to become a better person oneself” (p. 861). Similarly, Algoe and Haidt (2009) argue that employees who are high in other-praising moral emotions should motivate changes and behaviors that are beneficial in the long run. Thus, when employees are charged with other-praising moral emotions, they will be more likely to engage in moral actions themselves, such as reducing unethical behaviors and reporting unethical issues for sustainable development.

Second, other-praising moral emotions broaden followers’ awareness and encourage followers to display more novel, exploratory and ethical behaviors. Fredrickson (1998) “broaden and build model” suggests that positive emotions prompt individuals to pursue novel, varied, and creative paths of actions rather than discard trivial behavioral scripts. Other-praising moral emotions fit well with this “broaden and build model”. Thus, employees with high other-praising moral emotions will go beyond their own normal duties to display more ethical behaviors. Furthermore, previous researchers have pointed to the positive relationship between other-praising moral emotions (e.g., elevation, gratitude, and admiration) and prosocial or ethical behaviors, such as helping others ( Haidt, 2003 ; Algoe and Haidt, 2009 ). Therefore, we propose that:

Hypothesis 2: Other-praising moral emotions is positively related to followers’ moral actions, such as (a) reporting more ethical issues and (b) engaging in less unethical behavior.

Combining the above arguments—because ethical leadership acts as a critical antecedent of followers’ other-praising moral emotions (Hypothesis 1)—and because followers’ other-praising moral emotions could motivate them to do moral actions, we anticipate that other-praising moral emotions play a critical role in translating positive external influences (i.e., ethical leadership) to followers’ actual moral actions. Haidt (2003) also suggested that other-praising moral emotions encourage individuals to be a better person and to follow the moral example (i.e., the ethical leader) to demonstrate more ethical behaviors, creating “a virtuous ripple effect”. Hence, we argue that ethical leadership can invoke followers’ other-praising moral emotions, which in turn will lead to increased willingness to report unethical issues and decrease unethical behaviors at work.

Hypothesis 3: Ethical leadership will have positive effects on followers’ moral actions, such as (a) reporting more ethical issues and (b) engaging in less unethical behavior by invoking followers’ other-praising moral emotions.

Moderating Effect of Leader’s Core Self-Evaluation

Although we believe that ethical leadership can invoke followers’ other-praising moral emotions, whether the followers would indeed be moved and inspired depends on the extent to which the followers treat their ethical leader as an important source of information. According to social information processing theory ( Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978 ), an individual’s immediate social environment provides information cues to shape the individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. However, although the direct leader is one of the important environmental factors for employees, different leaders may influence their followers differently ( Rees and Segal, 1984 ). For example, if an ethical leader has no confidence about what he/she believes and what he/she has done, the followers may question their leaders’ ethical behavior, let alone generating moral emotions.

This paper focuses on leader core self-evaluation as the boundary factor for several reasons. First, core self-evaluation provides an integrative framework addressing the effects of employee dispositions on their job attitudes ( Bono and Judge, 2003 ). Judge et al. (2003) identified four components of core self-evaluation: generalized self-efficacy, self-esteem, emotional stability, and locus of control. Since these traits are fundamental and broaden self-perceptions, core self-evaluation is thought to have overarching influence on all other appraisals ( Johnson et al., 2008 ). Second, core self-evaluation reflects people’s beliefs about their own ability to interact with the environment by exhibiting their own behaviors ( Bono and Judge, 2003 ). By demonstrating efficacy beliefs while interacting with others, individuals with high core self-evaluation provide additional information cues for others to translate individuals’ behaviors. Third, previous leadership studies have called for investigating the role of core self-evaluation on leadership effectiveness ( Resick et al., 2009 ). Hence, it is important to explore how the leader’s core self-evaluation affects the effectiveness of ethical leadership.

We propose that when the leader has high core self-evaluation, the positive effect of ethical leadership on followers’ other-praising moral emotions get strengthened. According to social information processing theory, employees’ attitudes and behaviors can be shaped by environment information cues ( Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978 ). As a part of the followers’ immediate social environment, leader’s behaviors could exhibit both ethical and efficacy information. When an ethical leader has high core self-evaluation, he/she will be more confident about what he/she has done ( Bono and Judge, 2003 ), thus making the ethical information (e.g., values, standards and behaviors) more salient for employees. On one hand, ethical leaders with high core self-evaluation will carry out more ethical standards and practices, thus invoking followers’ other-praising moral emotions by strengthening the ethical values and behaviors. On the other hand, high core self-evaluation leaders have high self-regulatory capacities to control their own actions to cope with external constraints ( Johnson et al., 2008 ), which encourages followers to develop more positive feelings toward their leader. On the contrary, when an ethical leader has low core self-evaluation, he/she may have little confidence or ability to stick to ethical standards and behaviors himself/herself, thus conveying less ethical information cues to followers and invoking less moral emotions eventually. Therefore, we propose that:

Hypothesis 4: Leader core self-evaluation moderates the relationship between ethical leadership and other-praising moral emotions, such that the relationship between ethical leadership and other-praising moral emotions will be strengthened when leader has high core self-evaluation.

According to social information processing theory ( Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978 ), leader’s ethical and efficacy characters could jointly affect employees’ attitude and behaviors. Since ethical leadership and leader core self-evaluation interact to influence employees’ other-praising moral emotions (Hypothesis 4) and other-praising moral emotions elicit moral actions (Hypothesis 2), we propose a mediated moderation effect to theorize that followers’ other-praising moral emotions help translate leader’s ethical and efficacy characteristics into their own moral actions.

Hypothesis 5: Other-praising moral emotions mediate the effect of interaction between ethical leadership and leader core self-evaluation on followers’ (a) reporting ethical issues and (b) unethical behavior.

Participants and Procedures

Data was collected from several organizations located in Mainland China. Industry of these companies varies from manufacturing, real-estate and high-tech industry. A time-lagged data collection method was designed to reduce the potential common method bias. At Time 1, 72 teams were contacted in these companies, ranging from research (29%), production (43%), sales (18%), and other functional teams (11%). Each team has one leader and more than three employees (the average number of followers per team is 4.52). One of the authors went directly to the workplace to distribute the questionnaire. Each participant was offered with a questionnaire, a $2 gift, and an introductory letter to briefly introduce the research purpose and ensure participants’ confidentiality. 40 min later, we collected the questionnaire back. Finally, we received questionnaires from 72 leaders and 350 followers. About 7 weeks later, at Time 2, we distributed the questionnaire directly to the person who participated in the first survey and a total of 64 leaders (a response rate of 89%) and 295 followers (a response rate of 84%) responded. After excluding some uncompleted questionnaire, we finally identified 64 leaders and 289 followers. 48% of leaders were women and their average age was 39.0 years ( SD = 8.47), and they have worked in their company for an average of 9.9 years ( SD = 9.4). 58% of followers were women and their average age was 31.73 years ( SD = 8.41), and their average organizational tenure was 5.46 years ( SD = 7.01).

At Time 1, followers were asked to rate ethical leadership and their demographics background information and leaders were asked to report their own core self-evaluation and demographics information. At Time 2, followers completed measures of moral emotions and reporting unethical issues and leaders rated their followers’ unethical behaviors.

To ensure the internal validity of our translated scales, a back-translation process (c.f. Brislin, 1970 ) was conducted on all survey items.

Ethical Leadership

Ethical leadership was measured with a ten-item scale developed by Brown et al. (2005) . Sample items include “(my leader) sets an example of how to do things the right way in terms of ethics” and “(my leader) “conducts his or her personal life in an ethical manner” (α = 0.96). Items were rated on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (totally disagree) to 7 (totally agree).

Other-Praising Moral Emotions

We measured the five other-praising moral emotions proposed by Brown and Mitchell (2010) , by using the format for assessment from Brunstein (1993) . The five other-praising moral emotions are elevation, awe, inspiration, gratitude, and admiration. Followers were asked to report the extent they feel when interaction with their leader during the past months. Items were rated on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very frequently). The Cronbach’s α was 0.86.

Leader Core Self-Evaluation

We measured leader core self-evaluation with 12-item from Judge et al. (2003) . Sample items were “I am confident 1 get the success I deserve in life” and “I complete tasks successfully” (α = 0.94). Items were rated on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (totally disagree) to 7 (totally agree).

Reporting Unethical Issues

Reporting unethical issues was measured with the two items from Mayer et al. (2013) ’s reporting unethical conduct scale. The items are “If I personally observed conduct that violated our company’s standards of ethical business conduct I would report it” and “If I witnessed an employee violate our company’s code of conduct I would report it” (α = 0.90). Items were rated on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (totally disagree) to 7 (totally agree).

Unethical Behavior

Leaders were asked to rate followers’ unethical behavior with a seven-item scale from Moore et al. (2012) . Sample items include “falsifies a receipt to get reimbursed for more money than he/she spent on business expenses” and “takes property from work without permission” (α = 0.76). Items were rated on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (never) to 7 (daily).

Control Variables

Since we based on social information processing perspective to examine how ethical leadership affects follower moral emotions, we controlled follower age, gender, and the interaction frequency between leader and follower ( Lopes et al., 2005 ) to exclude potential confounded effects. Frequency of interaction with leader was measured with a 3-point item adapted from McAllister (1995) ranging from 1 (many times daily), to 3 (once or twice in the past 1 month). The item was “How frequently do you interact with your supervisor at work?” Follower gender was measured as a dummy variable, with “0” refers men and “1” refers to women.

Analytical Strategy

Within-group interrater agreement (rwg, James et al., 1993 ) and ICC values were computed to examine whether employee-rating ethical leadership could be aggregated to team level. Ethical leadership had an average r wg value of 0.94 with ICC(1) and ICC(2) of 0.46 and 0.80. Thus, according to these results, we aggregated ethical leadership to team level.

Follow the recommendation of Raudenbush et al. (2011) , we used hierarchical linear modeling to test our hypotheses. As our hypothesis 2 and hypothesis 3 indicated cross-level indirect effect, we used Montel Carlo method to test those hypotheses ( Preacher et al., 2010 ).

Preliminary Analyses

Table 1 provides the means, standard deviations, reliability, and correlations among all variables. Ethical leadership was positively related to moral emotions ( r = 0.33, p < 0.001). Moral emotions was positively related to reporting unethical issues ( r = 0.43, p < 0.001) and was negatively related to unethical behavior ( r = −0.25, p < 0.001).

TABLE 1. Means, standard deviations, and correlations for all variables.

We adopted the confirmatory factor analysis to verify discriminant validity of all the constructs. The measurement model was composed of four latent variables (ethical leadership, moral emotions, reporting unethical issues, and unethical behavior) with 24 indicators (10 items for ethical leadership, 5 items for moral emotions, 2 items for reporting unethical issues, and 7 items for unethical behavior). Results (see Table 2 ) showed that the four-factor model had the best fi to the data (χ 2 = 1487.84, df = 485, χ 2 / df = 3.07, CFI = 0.90, TLI = 0.89, RMSEA = 0.08), indicating that the constructs used in our model had good discriminant validity.

TABLE 2. Confirmatory factor analyses.

Hypotheses Testing

We used hierarchical linear modeling to test our hypotheses. As shown in Table 3 , after controlling follower age, gender and interaction frequency with their leader, ethical leadership was positively related to other-praising moral emotions (γ = 0.61, SE = 0.12, p < 0.001; Model 1b), supporting hypothesis 1. Meanwhile, the interaction between ethical leadership and leader core self-evaluation was positively related to other-praising moral emotions (γ = 0.18, SE = 0.07, p < 0.05; Model 1c), supporting hypothesis 4. Results from Model 2b showed that other-praising moral emotions had a positive effect on reporting unethical issues (γ = 0.41, SE = 0.10, p < 0.001), supporting hypothesis 2a. Similarly, results from Model 3b showed that other-praising moral emotions had a negative effect on unethical behavior (γ = −0.02, SE = 0.01, p < 0.05), supporting hypothesis 2b.

TABLE 3. Hierarchical linear modeling results.

We further plotted the interactive effects and performed the simple slop tests. As shown in Figure 2 , when leader has high core self-evaluation, ethical leadership was significantly positively related to moral emotions ( t = 4.17, p < 0.001). However, when leader core self-evaluation is low, the relationship between ethical leadership and moral emotions was not significant ( t = 1.74, p = 0.08), supporting our hypothesis 4.

FIGURE 2. Interaction effect between ethical leadership and leader core self-evaluation on other-praising moral emotions.

We followed Preacher et al. (2010) ’s recommendation to use Montel Carlo method to test cross-level indirect effect (i.e., Hypothesis 2a, 2b, 5a, and 5b). Results with 20000 times bootstrapping showed that the indirect effect between ethical leadership and reporting unethical issues via other-praising moral emotions was 0.29, with 95% confidence interval between 0.17 and 0.42 (not including 0), supporting hypothesis 2a. Similarly, the indirect effect between ethical leadership and reporting unethical issues via other-praising moral emotions was −0.02, with 95% confidence interval between −0.024 and −0.011 (not including 0), supporting hypothesis 2b. Moreover, the mediated moderation effect of moral emotions in relationship between hypothesized interaction (i.e., the interaction between ethical leadership and leader core self-evaluation) and reporting unethical issues was 0.08, with 95% confidence interval between 0.06 and 0.10 (not including 0), supporting hypothesis 5a. The mediated moderation effect of moral emotions in relationship between hypothesized interaction and unethical behavior was −0.005, with 95% confidence interval between −0.006 and −0.004 (not including 0), supporting hypothesis 5b.

The present study has investigated how ethical leadership improves followers’ moral actions through generating followers’ moral emotions. We have found that ethical leadership invokes followers’ other-praising moral emotions and eventually promotes moral actions among the followers, such as reporting more ethical conduct and engaging in less unethical behaviors. Furthermore, when ethical leaders have high core self-evaluation, followers’ other-praising moral emotions as well as their subsequent moral actions will be more likely evoked. On the other hand, when the leader has lower core self-evaluation, the positive effect of ethical leadership on follower other-praising moral emotions becomes neutralized.

Theoretical Contributions

Our research contributes to literature in multiple ways. By introducing the affective perspective, it has offered an emotional explanation about why ethical leadership matters. Previous scholars had consistently suggested that while considering the vital effects of moral emotions on moral actions ( Harvey et al., 2016 ), it is essential for future leadership research to understand the role of moral emotions ( Brown and Mitchell, 2010 ; Lindebaum et al., 2017 ). For example, followers’ hostile affective states can help explain how followers translate their leader’s mistreatment into their own deviant behaviors ( Mayer et al., 2012b ). However, although researchers have demonstrated that ethical leadership can benefit followers and teams in multiple ways ( Brown et al., 2005 ; Avey et al., 2012 ), the question of what role emotions play in employees’ reactions to ethical leadership has not been answered clearly. This answer is important because it helps us understand the causal relationship between ethical leadership and follower moral actions ( Brown and Mitchell, 2010 ) and distinguish ethical leadership from other positive leadership approaches in influencing followers. Drawing on social information processing theory, we have found that ethical leadership evokes followers’ other-praising moral emotions and enhances their moral actions. Specifically, by displaying high moral standards and behaving ethically, ethical leaders invoke follower’s other-praising moral emotions such as elevation, awe, and inspiration, which eventually motivates followers to report more unethical issues and engage in less unethical behavior. Thus, our research has provided an emotional linkage between ethical leadership and follower moral actions, contributing to literature on ethical leadership.

Our research also contributes to emotion literature by focusing on other-praising moral emotions and offering new insights on the association between emotions and behaviors in the moral domain. It is well-documented that emotions have significant effects on individual’s attitudes and behaviors ( Cropanzano et al., 2017 ; Lebel, 2017 ). However, previous studies have paid more attention on more generalized emotions such as positive emotions and negative emotions ( Matta et al., 2014 ). Although those efforts increased our understanding about how emotions shape individual behaviors, several theorists have argued for more specific-domain research on the differentiated influences of specific emotions on behaviors ( Tangney et al., 2007 ; Brown and Mitchell, 2010 ; Horberg et al., 2011 ). For example, several scholars have called for future research to pay attention to moral emotions by revealing its unique role in linking organizational moral standards and employee moral actions ( Tangney et al., 2007 ; Lindebaum et al., 2017 ). In response to such calls, our research examined the positive association between ethical leadership, follower moral emotions, and moral behaviors. Specifically, our results showed that followers are more likely to generate other-praising moral emotions toward their ethical leaders and then conduct more moral actions, such as reporting more unethical issues. Thus, our research contributes to emotion literature by extending our knowledge about the influence of emotions on behaviors in the moral domain.

Finally, our research has contributed to ethical leadership literature by exploring the boundary conditions under which ethical leaders could be more influential in invoking follower moral emotions. Although the positive impacts of ethical leadership have been examined in previous studies (e.g., Brown et al., 2005 ; Avey et al., 2012 ), our knowledge about the conditions under which ethical leadership will be more effective is still far from being satisfactory. Several scholars have noted that without revealing the boundary conditions of effectiveness of ethical leadership, we would not be able reach a comprehensive understanding of ethical leadership ( Brown and Treviño, 2006 ). In response, our results showed that ethical leadership will be more effective when the leader has high core self-evaluation. By contrast, when an ethical leader has low core self-evaluation, followers will not generate other-praising moral emotions toward their leader. Our research thus contributes to ethical leadership literature by investigating how leader characteristics influence the impact of ethical leadership on followers.

Practical Implications

Our results verify the effectiveness of ethical leadership on follower moral actions, suggesting that ethical leadership is effective to promote employees to behave more ethically. Moreover, our findings show that ethical leaders trigger followers to foster other-praising moral emotions. Organizations should actively hire or cultivate more ethical leaders, since those leaders could benefit followers and, at the same time, the organization. Meanwhile, following our finding that ethical leadership elicits followers’ moral actions, leaders should themselves be more willing to behave ethically. Furthermore, our findings show that when an ethical leader has high core self-evaluation, followers’ moral emotions will be more likely invoked. This result suggests that ethical leaders should be self-motivated and express strong self-confidence in front of their followers. Our result also indicates that when the leader has low core self-evaluation, the positive effects of ethical leadership on followers’ moral emotions will be neutralized. This finding could act as a reminder that ethical leadership may not always be useful.

Limitations and Future Research

Our study comes with several limitations that should be noted. First, since this study was conducted in China, it is not very clear to what extent can our results be generalized to other contexts. Previous research has indicated that several cultural factors, such as power distance, impact the interactions between leaders and followers ( Kirkman et al., 2009 ). For example, Kirkman et al. (2009) found that the effect of transformational leadership on procedural justice is more positive when followers have low power distance orientation. Similarly, power distance orientation may also affect the relationship between ethical leadership and followers’ moral emotions since followers with different level of power distance orientation may translate their leader’s ethical behavior differently. Thus, we recommend future research examining whether cultural factors make a difference in our proposed model.

Moreover, although our research has revealed the vital role of other-praising moral emotions in linking ethical leadership and follower moral behaviors, we did not exclude the possibility that other kinds of moral emotions may make a difference. For example, as Brown and Mitchell (2010) noted, other-condemning emotions such as disgust and self-focused emotions such as shame may also explain the effect of ethical/unethical leadership on follower behaviors. Meanwhile, in our research, we intended to provide a comprehensive emotional explanation for the influence of ethical leadership on follower moral actions, thus we did not examine whether specific other-praising emotions (e.g., elevation, inspiration, and gratitude) will have distinct effects. Since the behavioral tendency varies across different emotions ( Lazarus, 1991 ), we encourage future research to dig into the emotional link between ethical leadership and follower moral actions.

The effectiveness of ethical leadership has been well-documented in a growing number of studies. Therefore, it is surprising that we still lack enough knowledge about the emotional linkage between ethical leadership and follower moral actions. The present research proposed and found that ethical leadership prompts followers to engage in more moral actions by invoking followers’ other-praising moral emotions. Moreover, when the ethical leader has high core self-evaluation, the positive effects of ethical leadership on follower moral emotions and moral actions is strengthened. We hope our work will enhance our current knowledge on ethical leadership and provide new insights.

Ethics Statement

An ethics approval was not required as per our institution’s guidelines and national regulations. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants in our study.

Author Contributions

YZ and JM designed and adopted the study, wrote the paper. FZ wrote the paper.

This research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71802193) and Humanities and Social Sciences grant of the Chinese Ministry of Education (No. 18YJA630149).

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords : ethical leadership, other-praising moral emotions, core self-evaluation, reporting unethical issues, unethical behavior

Citation: Zhang Y, Zhou F and Mao J (2018) Ethical Leadership and Follower Moral Actions: Investigating an Emotional Linkage. Front. Psychol. 9:1881. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01881

Received: 13 December 2017; Accepted: 13 September 2018; Published: 04 October 2018.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2018 Zhang, Zhou and Mao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Jianghua Mao, [email protected]

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• Published: 13 September 2024

Research ethics matter

Nature Methods volume  21 ,  page 1569 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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All life sciences research is potentially subject to ethical considerations. Institutions should support collaborations with professional ethicists and philosophers to help life scientists navigate ethical crossroads.

For scientists working with animals, human data or stem cells, or collecting ecological data in resource-poor settings, the ethical considerations of their research are something they must grapple with regularly. For those working at the molecular or cellular level or purely in silico, however, their experiences with ethics may be limited to a brief training course mainly covering issues of data manipulation and plagiarism.

Many molecular, cellular and computational biologists may think that research ethics — that is, whether the scientific questions being explored are ethical to pursue, whether the approaches used to pursue such questions are ethical, and whether the communication of that research is ethical — just do not apply to their work. But in this issue of Nature Methods , a Comment from Jeantine Lunshof and Julia Rijssenbeek 1 implores life scientists of all stripes to integrate discussions with professional ethicists and philosophers into the research planning process.

For some research fields, ethical guidelines are readily available. Research on human subjects — for example, the use of fMRI to study alterations to brain connectivity networks in disease — must be approved by ethics committees (in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki ), and such subjects must provide informed consent. Experiments with lab mice must also be preapproved by an ethics committee, and researchers should follow the ARRIVE reporting guidelines 2 , as well as the American Veterinary Medical Association guidelines for animal euthanasia. Developmental biologists working with human embryos should abide by ethics guidelines set by the International Society for Stem Cell Research . Ecologists collecting data in the global South are encouraged to follow the TRUST Code recommendations — in particular, by including local researchers in the work.

There are many areas of life sciences research, however, where research does not require ethics oversight and ethics guidelines are not readily available, but where ethical considerations may yet be important. There are likely several examples of methodologies and tools that, in the wrong hands, may lead to harmful gain-of-function experiments or dual-use threats to public health or national security. A molecular biologist tinkering to improve genome editing tools would be wise to ponder the implications of the unethical use of the technology for human germline editing, as in the ‘CRISPR babies’ case 3 . Computational biologists using AI technology for drug discovery need to be aware that such models could be misused to design biochemical weapons 4 .

In their Comment, Lunshof and Rijssenbeek describe a model called ‘collaborative ethics’, which calls for life sciences researchers to work closely with professional ethicists or philosophers starting at the earliest stages of research planning. As they write, collaboration can “improve the efficiency and robustness of outcomes” for the research team and also “prepare a team for a formal ethics review and criticism after publication.” Such collaborations also benefit the field of philosophy, “as direct involvement with the sciences allows long-held assumptions and arguments to be put to the test.”

In the collaborative ethics model, a research team will discuss their ideas and concepts with a professional ethicist or philosopher, who may ask probing questions about the nature of the work. The ethicist will help the researchers understand whether there are any ethical considerations and whether the potential harms of sharing the resulting new knowledge with society outweigh the potential benefits of advancing science. Lunshof and Rijssenbeek highlight how the collaborative ethics model played a role in three different projects: the engineering of synthetic human entities with embryo-like features, the development of brain organoids and the programming of computer-designed ‘biobots’. They note that collaborative ethics may also have a role to play in many other fields, such as protein engineering, systems biology, aging research and computational biology.

As described in our journal policy , performing ethical research is the responsibility of all scientists. Professional ethicists are not the police; their role is not to punish or curb scientific progress. Rather, ethicists can serve as a ‘conscience’ and help scientists understand the ethical implications of their work. Without such collaborations, the after-the-fact consequences could be much worse — yes, papers can be retracted, but reputations are already damaged and harmful gain-of-function work may be out there for the world to see.

For scientists used to dealing with quantitative measures and statistical significance, the concept of research ethics can feel a bit vague or murky, at best an afterthought to their work. This is even more a reason for breaking down the walls between science and ethics, especially in this age of rapid technology development and especially with swift advances in AI. We strongly encourage institutions to go beyond minimal ethics training courses and do much more to support close collaborations between scientists and professional ethicists.

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Research ethics matter. Nat Methods 21 , 1569 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-024-02425-0

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Published : 13 September 2024

Issue Date : September 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-024-02425-0

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