Search results

To date, the vast majority of existing research on unethical leadership has focused on top leaders’ actions and behaviors as the primary catalyst for the permeation of unethical behaviors in organizations. In this chapter, we shift the focus to middle and junior managers and argue that they too have an active role in contributing to the permeation of top-level unethical leadership. More specifically, we adopt a meaning-making lens to investigate how junior and middle-level managers perceive and interpret top-level unethical leadership and how such meaning-making affects their (un)ethical legitimacy. Understanding the role played by lower-level managers becomes vitally important to develop a more holistic picture of the permeation of unethical leadership. Findings from 30 in-depth interviews with top, middle, and junior managers reveal variables such as survival, group membership, and strain as buttressing meaning-making by lower-level managers. Findings also revealed two contrasting aspects, that is, “interactions” within organizational members as well as “silence” by top-level managers playing into individuals’ information processing and attribution capacities during ethical dilemmas. Real cases experienced by participants pertaining to the flow of unethical leadership illustrate how the central bearings play out in managerial practice.

This study aims to examine the effect of leader's use of procedural justice on followers' sense of organizational identification (OID), affect‐based trust and cognition‐based trust.

A survey study was conducted to examine the relationship between the proposed constructs. Regression analysis was used to analyze the data.

It was found that leaders enacting procedural justice positively affect OID and both types of trust. Further, only affect‐based trust (and not cognition‐based trust) mediated the relationship between procedural justice and OID.

The present findings reveal important new insights with respect to how procedural justice impacts upon followers' sense of OID. In fact, contrary to predictions based on theoretical reviews the results show that the cognitive concept of OID is mediated by an affective construct.

The present research presents a perspective of looking at procedural justice as a tool that leaders can use in organizations to promote followers' sense of OID. At the same time, it also explores the role of another important psychological process relevant to the well‐functioning of an organization, that is, trust in the leader.

This study examined the interactive effect of distributive justice and leader self‐sacrifice on employees' organizational commitment and autocratic leadership perceptions (ALP). We propose that positive leadership styles like self‐sacrifice will have a stronger impact on employees' attitudes and judgments when organizational outcomes are perceived and experienced as unfavorable or more negative. One such outcome that may turn out unfavorable is distributive justice. Findings indeed showed that leader self‐sacrifice positively influenced organizational commitment and negatively ALP, but only when distributive justice was low (i.e. perceptions of unfair outcomes).

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the influence of applicants' justice beliefs (i.e. belief in a just world and belief in tests) on justice expectations with respect to a forthcoming application for the job of prison guard. Further, it aims to study the moderating role of direct experiences on the relationship between beliefs and justice expectations.

A written survey was administered to 803 applicants, just before the start of the selection procedure. Data were self‐reported and collected at one point in time.

Significant positive relationships were found between both beliefs (i.e. belief in a just world and belief in tests) on procedural and distributive justice expectations. Moreover, the relationship between belief in tests and both types of justice expectations was stronger among experienced applicants. Conversely, the relationship between belief in a just world and distributive justice expectations was stronger among inexperienced applicants. This moderation was not found with respect to procedural justice expectations.

Insight into how justice expectations are formed in selection contexts, and consequently, how organizations can influence these expectations, is largely missing. Bell, Ryan, and Wiechmann provided a conceptual model on antecedents of justice expectations but its theoretical underpinning is rather weak and not well‐understood. Construal level theory was used in this study as a theoretical basis to predict how applicants might form justice expectations with respect to future selection procedures.