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Against the backdrop of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Finance Services Industry in Australia, this study on ethical leadership is timely. The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating effects of organisational identification, customer orientated behaviour, service climate and ethical climate on the relationship between ethical leadership and employee in-role performance.

The hypotheses were tested using a two-wave survey study of 233 bank employees in Australia.

Evidence from the study indicated that organisational identification, service climate and ethical climate mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and employee in-role performance. Surprisingly, the proposed mediation effect of customer orientation was not supported. However, ethical leadership was positively associated with customer orientated behaviour among employees.

Limitations of the study include collecting data at two time points, thereby rendering the study cross-sectional. Employee in-role performance was a self-rated measure.

This study showed that ethical leadership is critical to improving employee perceptions and experience of an organisation’s service climate, ethical climate, organisational identification, customer orientated behaviour and employee in-role performance. The authors raise a number of HRM implications for the development and enablement of ethical leaders in the banking context.

The findings presented in this paper highlight that ethical leadership is critical to improving employee perceptions and experience of an organisation’s service climate, ethical climate, organisational identification, customer orientated behaviour and employee in-role performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating effect of organizational politics on the relationships between work engagement, in-role performance and organization citizenship behavior – organization (OCBO).

Theoretical hypotheses were tested using a sample of 107 supervisor-subordinate dyads in China. Outcome variables, such as in-role performance and OCBO, were rated by supervisors.

Contrary to the established literature on positive work engagement-work outcomes relationships, the findings supported the prediction that work engagement was negatively related to supervisor-rated in-role performance and OCBO when the organizational is perceived as highly political.

The sample size for this study is relatively small. In addition, the authors measured organizational politics from employees’ perspectives, which might not reflect reality objectively. Furthermore, the data were collected at a single time point, so causal relationships could not be validated.

When employees perceive the work environment as political, organizations need to be aware of non-work factors that may influence supervisors’ evaluation of employee performance to ensure they do not demotivate and discourage highly engaged employees.

Considerable research has shown that work engagement is positively related to in-role performance and OCBO. The present study, however, challenges and extends previous research by suggesting that work engagement can lead to low supervisor evaluation of in-role performance and OCBO when the organization is perceived to be political.

Does client embeddedness lead to improved employee quality of life, such as job satisfaction, affective commitment and employee engagement? If so, is this relationship affected by gender, age, tenure and psychological contract breach (PCB)? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Regression and ANOVA analysis of a two-wave sample (n=121) of employees working for an aged care provider.

Client embeddedness at Time 1 predicts employee quality of life at Time 2. However, in this sample, this relationship is unaffected by gender, age and length of service. High levels of PCB weakens the relationship between client embeddedness and job satisfaction.

The employee-client relationship directly improves quality of working life. However, it is unclear whether this finding is unique to this organisation, or whether client embeddedness can be cultivated over time or is a characteristic of an employee.

Organisations can substantially benefit from encouraging appropriate client-employee relationships. By adopting HR practices aimed at acquiring and cultivating client embeddedness through recruitment, performance management and training practices, organisations may increase employee quality of working life, and reduce employee turnover.

This paper substantially increases the understanding of client embeddedness by clarifying the direct effects of the client-employee relationship, and by identifying boundary conditions on the effect of client embeddedness. It also points to a distinct approach to recruiting and developing employees in client-facing industries.