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Employee turnover, building a positive corporate image and ethical lapses in the corporate world demand business leaders to perform their jobs with a higher sense of responsibility. This study aims to investigate the mediating effect of ethical climate and corporate image by using the corporate social responsibility theory and social identity theory.

A sample of 280 employees from the banking sector of Pakistan was collected through a questionnaire-based survey by using the convenience sampling technique. The structural equation modeling technique using Smart partial least square was used to test the hypothesized model.

The findings of the study affirmed a significant positive correlation between responsible leadership and ethical climate and ethical climate is significantly positively correlated with corporate image. Meanwhile, the corporate image is negatively correlated with employees’ turnover intention. Results further corroborate ethical climate mediating effect between responsible leadership and corporate image and corporate image likewise mediates between ethical climate and employee turnover intention.

This study enriches the present literature on the subject of responsible leadership, ethical climate, corporate image and turnover intention from the employee’s point of view. Elucidating from previous studies, most of the investigations about the corporate image was conducted from the customers’ perspective and there has been a scarcity of studies focusing on employees’ perspective.

This study guides a value proposition that is concerned with the turnover of employees for human resource professionals from the banking industry. It explores a new dimension of the debate on employee turnover intention.

This study marks the first step toward corporate image as an organizational behavior construct by demonstrating that corporate image impact turnover intention. This study tests a model that demonstrates the role of ethical climate and corporate image in the linkage between responsible leadership and employees’ turnover intention.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of ethical climate types on trust in management using Victor and Cullen’s framework, which is based on Kohlberg’s theory of moral development and Gouldner’s sociocultural theory of organizations.

A sample of 270 employees from 10 organizations in India was used to investigate the specific relationships between ethical climate types and trust in management. Data were collected through self-report questionnaires. Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify the different types of ethical climates existing in the organizations. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to explore the relationship between ethical climates and trust in management.

It was found that ethical climates characterized by caring, laws and codes, and rules and procedures are significant predictors of trust in management. However, no support was obtained for any impact of ethical climates emphasizing company profit, self-interest or independence on trust in management.

Future research should examine trust in management as a mediating or moderating variable in the relationship between ethical climates and other organizational variables such as commitment, citizenship behaviour or productivity. Additionally, research could also examine different cultural and organizational contexts in testing out these relationships. The role of other constructs such as personality of supervisors and ethical sensitivity in developing trust in management may also been investigated.

Organizations should try to develop climates based on caring and also emphasize adherence to laws and codes as well as rules and procedures to enhance trust in the management.

The findings of the study are unique and original because literature examining ethical climates and trust is scarce, and this is the first study to explore how ethical climates can impact trust in management in the Indian context. In particular, the results are unique for. Contrary to expectations, no negative impact of climates of self-interest, company interest and independence on trust in management could be seen in this study. The results throw open new directions to theory building on ethical climates and trust in the Indian context.

Research addressing the impact of tacit and explicit pay secrecy policies on organizational climates is fairly limited. While researchers desire to explain the impact of such policies on individuals' pay satisfaction, a direct effect has not been supported. This study seeks to better explain how these policies are related to ethical climates and pay satisfaction.

This study draws on ethical climate theory to show the influence of ethical climate types on job satisfaction and a moderating effect of explicit and tacit pay secrecy policies on this relationship. This is accomplished through designing this study by using existing scales from the literature in a survey methodology. A pilot study of 246 undergraduate students was used to validate the measures. Then, a sample of 217 adults was obtained to test the proposed relationships. Linear regression is employed to analyze the data and to test the existence of direct and moderating effects.

The five empirically tested ethical climates each have a direct effect on pay satisfaction. Explicit pay secrecy policies has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between rules, law and code ethical climates, and pay satisfaction. Tacit pay secrecy policies moderate the relationship between caring, rules, law and code, and independence ethical climates and pay satisfaction.

The findings strengthen the literature by demonstrating a stronger relationship between ethical climates and pay satisfaction. While some of the moderating effects were significant, others were not. This was surprising, but present avenues to further test ethical climate theory and the impact of pay secrecy policies.

This study presents practical implications for managers. Understanding how these policies may be viewed differently, depending on the type of climate that is experienced within an organization may help managers evaluate using them. Trying to protect employees or the organization itself by enacting these polices may backfire and create additional problems. Managers may want to evaluate the manner that they communicate these polices through formal or informal means, depending on the type of climate experienced within the workplace.

This study is the first to examine the influence of explicit and tacit pay secrecy policies on the relationship between ethical climates and employees' satisfaction with pay. It leads to a number of directions for further research that may continue to build upon this study in order to further advance scholarly understanding of the importance of ethical climates and pay secrecy policies.

Interest in servant leadership has grown exponentially over the past decade as evident in the surge of academic- and practitioner-oriented publications on the subject. While prior research has shown that servant leadership leads to citizenship behavior, no study has explored the ethical pathway as the underlying influence process despite the fact that servant leadership is an ethical approach to leadership. On the basis of social learning theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine psychological ethical climate as a key mediator between servant leadership and citizenship behavior.

Survey data were collected from 123 leader–follower dyads from eight high-performing firms listed on the Indonesian Stock Exchange, and analyzed using multiple regression analysis.

The results showed that the relationship between servant leadership and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) (both for OCBI and OCBO) is mediated by psychological ethical climate.

This study demonstrates the value of using a servant leadership approach in order to foster a psychological ethical climate and increase OCBs. As such, the authors highlight the importance of a systematic approach to develop servant leaders in organizations.

This research contributes to the understanding of the ethical mechanism that explains the relationship between servant leadership and follower outcomes. Drawing on social learning theory, the findings show that servant leaders are ethical climate architects through their role modeling behaviors and interactions with followers.

To deepen our understanding about the development of turnover intention, the purpose of this paper is to develop a model that explains how ethical climate influences turnover intention based on the ethical climate theory and social identity theory.

The hypotheses of this study were statistically tested using a survey of working professionals from Taiwan’s high-tech industry. Of the 400 questionnaires distributed to the working professionals from five large high-tech firms in a well-known science park in Northern Taiwan, 352 usable questionnaires were returned for a questionnaire response rate of 88 percent.

The test results of this study first show that all three dimensions of ethical climate (i.e. instrumental, benevolent, and principled) are indirectly related to turnover intention via the mediation of firm attractiveness. Moreover, instrumental and benevolent climate directly relate to turnover intention, whereas benevolent climate negatively moderates the relationship between principled climate and firm attractiveness.

This study finds that benevolent climate plays a dual role as an antecedent and a moderator in the formation of turnover intention, complementing prior studies that merely concentrate on the single role of benevolent climate as either an antecedent or a moderator. The effect of principled climate on organizational identification complements the theoretical discussion by Victor and Cullen (1987) about deontology in which an ethical workplace climate (such as legitimacy) drives employees to invest in identity attachments to the organization and influences their future career decision (e.g. turnover).

Recent high-profile ethical scandals in start-up organizations have made people wonder whether entrepreneurship may cultivate a work environment with less emphasis on ethics. This study examined a psychological process about how an organization’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO) can affect its treatment of probationary employees, a vulnerable yet understudied group of workers.

The authors recruited 241 participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk. They answered an online survey about their experiences as probationary employees.

This study found that job feedback and meaning moderated the relationship between EO and ethical climate, such that this relationship was statistically significant and positive only among participants who reported high levels of feedback and job meaning. Ethical climate, in turn, was found to be related to a reduction in workplace incivility experienced by probationary employees. The indirect effect of EO on incivility via ethical climate was contingent on job feedback and meaning.

This study extends the discussion on the entrepreneurial context, adds to EO literature with findings on its indirect effect on nonfinancial performance and reinforces institutional theory through job characteristics’ moderating roles. However, a methodological limitation is conducting a cross-sectional single-source survey due to limited access to firms and probationary employees, considering the hidden population involved.

This study found no evidence of probationary employee exploitation in high EO organizations. Job seekers should embrace probationary work at start-ups. Entrepreneurial leaders should balance being proactive, innovative and caring toward employees.

It is debatable whether entrepreneurship leads to unethical organizational conduct. By studying a vulnerable group of employees, the authors discovered that EO, when paired with favorable job design factors, can create a more ethical workplace where temporary talents are treated with dignity and respect.

This study aims to investigate the whistle-blowing behaviour in Ugandan public procurement by using whistle-blowing supporting institutions, procuring and disposing entity (PDE) ethical climate and whistle-blowing expectancy.

A quantitative cross-sectional survey was conducted using a sample of 118 drawn from a population of 179 central government (PDEs). Data were collected using self-administered questionnaires, resulting in 222 usable questionnaires from 70 PDEs, representing a response rate of 62.71 per cent.

The results reveal that the whistle-blowing supporting institutions and PDE ethical climate are significant predictors of whistle-blowing intentions and behaviour, accounting for 30.2 per cent of the variance. The authors therefore recommend that whistle-blowing supporting institutions, like the Whistle Blowers Protection Act, should be reviewed and strengthened to promote whistle-blowing intentions and behaviour. This could be done through reviewing the Act to make it enforceable, giving power to the whistle-blowers, strengthening policies, developing safeguards against retaliation by making every chief executive officer in the public sector accountable, increasing whistle-blowing incentives and providing whistle-blowing hotlines for anonymous whistle-blowers. PDEs should also create conducive ethical climates that encourage people to voice their concerns internally or externally, and ethical committees should be established within PDEs and other bodies such as the Inspector General of Government for ensuring that whistle-blowing systems are in place and promoted. There is a need to increase whistle-blowing expectancy through the effective handling of reported cases to their conclusion and the use of role models.

Using public universities as research setting, this study explored whether perception of the prevalence of instrumental ethical climate (IEC) differ among employees based on their gender, age, education levels, job tenure and status.

Structured survey questionnaires were used in collecting data, and responses from a final sample of 101 senior level university employees were used in the analysis.

Results of independent t-tests and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that although participants had a high overall perception of the presence of IEC in their organisations, statistically significant differences in perception were only found for the gender and education level groups. Furthermore, this research concludes that females are more perceptive of, and sensitive to, the existence of unethical decision-making conditions in their work place, compared to males employees; and that employees with low levels of education are more likely to perceive stronger levels of IECs in their work environment, compared to their more educated counterparts.

Although the sample size is large enough for the kind of inferential analytical method employed in this study, it may not be representative of all the public universities in Nigeria. Furthermore, given that private organisations may encourage different ethical work climates than public establishments, the generalisability of our findings is limited.

To reduce unethical practices in public universities, more women should be encouraged to take up top decision-making positions.

Compared to the general business and public service fields, the current study is one of very few studies that empirically examined individual-level antecedents of ethical climate in African Universities.

Based on the theory of reasoned action, this study aims to illustrate how employees’ safety behavior can be enhanced in the workplace by specifically examining how anticipated regret leads to workplace safety behavior and the contextual factor of organizational ethical climate.

The authors adopted a quantitative approach and designed their survey from validated scales in prior studies. Data were obtained from two different sources, including 149 employees and 31 immediate supervisors. Hierarchical linear modeling techniques were applied to test the hypotheses.

The results showed that anticipated regret was significantly related to safety compliance and safety participation; egoistic ethical climate was negatively correlated with safety compliance and safety participation, while benevolent ethical climate was only positively correlated with safety participation. For cross-level moderating effects, both benevolent and principle ethical climate moderate the relationship between anticipated regret and safety participation, whereas all three ethical climates did not moderate the relationship between anticipated regret and safety compliance.

It contributes to current literature by identifying critical determinants of employees’ safety behavior, which would enable practitioners to manage safety in the workplace and foster a safe working environment. Specifically, fostering benevolent ethical climate can better promote employees’ perceptions of the importance of discretionary safety behavior.

This study suggests that organizational practitioners could use the salience of anticipated regret to promote the safety behavioral intentions of employees in the workplace. Further, the authors examined a multilevel framework, which elaborates individual- and organizational-level antecedents of employee safety behavior as well as the impact of cross-level interactions on employee safety behavior.

In the background of the post-financial crisis era and the transition of China’s economic development, the frequent occurrence of workplace deviant behavior in the economic field, such as stealing and bribery, caused a huge impact on the enterprise. In recent years, the deviant behavior of employees has been increased noticeably. The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of paternalistic leadership on employee deviant behavior in workplace. To have a deep understanding of the relationship between paternalistic leadership and employee deviant behavior, the author’s design rule-oriented ethical climate and self-interest-oriented ethical climate as two mediators in this research model.

Based on social learning theory and stressor-emotion model, this study conducts an investigation of influence mechanism between paternalistic leadership and workplace deviant behavior. Time-lagged data was collected from 226 employees from six cities in China. To test the hypothesis that the authors developed in this paper, the authors use empirical models from the existing literature about paternalistic leadership on employee deviant behavior. They establish multiple linear regressions to test the hypotheses.

This study reveals the direct effect of authoritarian leadership on employee deviant behavior and the moderated roles of benevolent leadership and moral leadership, also analysis the mediated mechanism of self-interest-oriented ethical climate and rule-oriented ethical climate. The results show that the higher the degree of authority leaders show in the organization, the easier to stimulate workplace deviance of employee, self-interest-oriented ethical climate and rule-oriented ethical climate play mediated role between authoritarian leadership and workplace deviant behavior. The interaction of benevolent leadership and moral leadership with authoritarian leadership can weaken the self-interest-oriented ethical climate but has nothing to do with rule-oriented ethical climate.

This study has three main contributions to the previous literature. First, this study explores the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee workplace deviance, which could enrich the research on these negative behaviors in the Chinese context. Second, this study unpacks the “black box” in which authoritarian leadership influences employee workplace deviant behavior. Third, this study further examines the impacts of different combinations of the three factors of paternalistic leadership.