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Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a cross-cultural scale of customers’ perceived switching costs (PSCs). Customers’ PSCs function as a powerful defensive marketing tool that restrains customers from switching.

Four sets of survey data were collected in the UK, Egypt, Germany, and China. An overall response rate of 86 percent was achieved across the four countries. Cross-cultural equivalence of the PSCs scale was assessed using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis.

Tests of configural, metric, and factor variance invariance confirmed that the PSCs scale is appropriate for meaningful cross-cultural comparisons.

Data were collected in four countries from the financial service context. Future researchers should test the short-form PSCs (PSCs-S) scale across different cultural and industrial contexts to enhance its generalizability.

The cross-cultural PSCs-S scale presented here will enhance international marketing researchers’ ability to test theory containing customers’ PSCs as central variables, and provide managers with a measurement tool that they can use to better segment and manage their customers.

This study is one of the first to develop a cross-cultural PSCs scale. Despite the growth of research into customers’ PSCs, research on the topic has been limited by the lack of a cross-cultural measurement instrument. The latter now furnishes the research community with the opportunity to gain a fuller understanding of switching behavior, to establish the scale's generalizability, and to make meaningful comparisons of PSCs across cultures.

The widespread use of communication technologies and social media platforms such as the #ME TOO movement has amplified the importance for business leaders to demonstrate high standards of ethical behavior for career success. Although the concept of ethical leadership has been widely investigated, a theoretical framework from a career perspective does not yet exist.

This study draws from sensemaking theory to argue that career identity salience shapes leaders' communication behavior to influence the extent to which they are perceived to be ethical by subordinates. We test our hypotheses using multisource data with a sample (n = 337) of business managers.

The results show that career identity salience has positive influence on communication competence, which positively influences ethical leadership. We further find that communication frequency positively moderates the relationship between communication competence and ethical leadership.

The theoretical and practical implications that, motivated by their career identity, career-ambitious leaders can manipulate subordinates' perceptions of their ethical behavior are discussed along with suggestions for future research.

To our knowledge, this is the first research to provide a career perspective on ethical leadership.

Multiculturalism is now one of the greatest challenges in the Western society. It supposes a deeper awareness of the various cultures involved in a given society. Of course, the well‐known cultural and ethnic groups must basically be involved in such a social change. But, since the arising and growth of business ethics as a field of research, the business world as a social institution has revealed itself as a complex network of subcultures. So, the “organizational culture” has become an “a priori concept” in business ethics. Although many researches deal with corporate culture, very few authors emphasize its structural elements. A systemic view of the organizational culture expresses how we cannot develop a corporate ethics without at least a “fore‐understanding” or, at best, a critical judgment on the organizational culture of a given corporation. I will describe the four subsystems of the organizational culture and their ethical implications.

Research has demonstrated that ethical leadership helps to limit subordinates' workplace deviance. In this chapter, we draw on social cognitive theory of moral thought and action to further understand why ethical leadership has a preventing impact on workplace deviance. We propose that the key mechanism between ethical leadership and deviance is moral disengagement, which refers to the process of making unethical behavior morally or socially acceptable. Specifically, subordinates learn cognitively and emotionally from ethical leaders to minimize the adoption of moral disengagement. When they decrease the use of moral disengagement, subordinates are less likely to display deviant behavior.

This study aims to examine how supervisor bottom-line mentality (BLM) influences subordinate unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB), considering the mediating role of subordinate moral disengagement and the moderating role of their power-distance orientation.

The theoretical model was tested using two-wave data collected from employees of five firms in southern China.

Subordinate moral disengagement was found to mediate the positive relationship between supervisor BLM and subordinate UPB. Furthermore, for subordinates with high power-distance orientation, the positive relationship between supervisor BLM and subordinate moral disengagement and the indirect positive relationship between supervisor BLM and subordinate UPB were both strengthened.

First, organizations should train their employees to pursue goals ethically based on established standards and policies for acceptable behavior and to punish UPB. Second, organizations should strengthen employees' ethics and reduce their likelihood of moral disengagement. Finally, organizations should create an environment that allows subordinates to question their supervisors’ BLM.

First, the results demonstrate that supervisor BLM is an antecedent of subordinate UPB. Second, the study sheds important new light on how employees respond to supervisor BLM through cognitive processes. Third, it examines the moderating role of subordinate power-distance orientation between supervisor BLM, moral disengagement and UPB.

This chapter provides a multilevel perspective on the impact of leaders’ emotional display and control on subordinates’ job satisfaction.

This multilevel study investigates how the association of employees’ perceived immediate leaders’ servant leadership and their job satisfaction is influenced by leaders’ emotional labor. Participants in this study included 180 employees and 40 immediate leaders from 40 groups across 16 firms. To avoid of common methods of variances, multiple ratings were employed. Servant leadership of immediate team leaders and subordinates’ job satisfaction were rated by subordinates.

The results showed the positive relationship between perceived team leaders’ creating value for community (one dimension of servant leadership) and team members’ job satisfaction is strengthened by an increase in leaders’ deep-acting of emotions, but is decreased with an increase in leaders’ surface-acting and expression of naturally felt emotions.

This study confirms that a team leader’s emotional labor is likely to affect team members’ job satisfaction, which is also related to employees’ perceived servant leadership. Although how leaders display their emotions in organizations has a significant influence on the association between leaders’ creating value for community and subordinates’ job satisfaction, this study did not identify the explicit mechanisms to explain why this happens.

These findings will enrich the practice of leaders’ emotional management in organizations.

This chapter is the first to provide a perspective to understand leaders’ emotional labor from cross-level analysis. This study also extends our understandings of the effects of servant leadership and its relationships with subordinates’ job satisfaction through an exploration of each dimension of servant leadership on job satisfaction rather than relying on an overall measure servant leadership.

Drawing on the dual-strategies theory of social rank and leader distance theory, this paper aims to investigate the influence of supervisor bottom-line mentality (BLM) on employee knowledge-related behaviors by considering the mediating role of perceived leader prestige or dominance and the moderating role of supervisor–subordinate guanxi (SSG).

This study collected survey data from 185 research and development employees in East China at three-time points. The authors conducted path analysis and bootstrapping-based analytic approach to test the hypotheses by Mplus7.0.

The results showed that supervisor BLM has a negative effect on employee knowledge sharing and a positive effect on knowledge hiding. Besides, perceived leader prestige or dominance mediated the relationship between supervisor BLM and employee knowledge hiding. Furthermore, SSG moderated the relationship between supervisor BLM and perceived leader prestige or dominance, as well as the indirect effects of supervisor BLM on knowledge hiding via perceived leader prestige or dominance.

There is limited research on investigating the influence of supervisor BLM in the field of knowledge management. The authors carried out this study to provide evidence of how and when supervisor BLM affects employee knowledge sharing and hiding.

Although a great number of studies have established the important role of leadership in workplace safety, it appears researchers are yet to consider the role that trust in leaders could play between ethical leadership and safety compliance within healthcare. To address that imbalance, this study aims to investigate the relationship between ethical leadership and safety compliance, with trust in the leader as the mediator.

Data were collected in three time periods from 237 hospital staff nurses (76.8 per cent women and 23.2 per cent men). Ordinary least squares regression-based path analysis using PROCESS for statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) macro was used to test the hypotheses.

Results showed that ethical leadership was positively related to trust in a leader but was not related to safety compliance. In addition, trust in leader was positively related to safety compliance and also mediated the positive relationship between ethical leadership and safety compliance.

The data were collected within healthcare organisations in a few localities in Nigeria, making it difficult to generalise the findings beyond the current sample let alone the entire country or even continent.

The findings imply that ethical leadership may not be directly effective in improving the safety compliance of subordinate nurses unless such a leader first develops a trust-based relationship with the subordinates.

The current study builds on and extends the burgeoning research in the area of leadership and employee outcome by investigating not only the direct relationship between ethical leadership and safety compliance but also incorporating trust in a leader as a mediator of this relationship.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between ethical leadership and the quality of the manager-subordinate relationship, as well as the moderating effect of female employees’ psychological empowerment on this relationship.

This is quantitative research in which an online questionnaire was distributed to female subordinates from multinational enterprises in Malaysia (n = 120). A partial least square is used for analysis in this research.

The findings confirm a strong positive correlation between all the seven ethical leadership dimensions and the quality of manager-subordinate relationship (leader member exchange). However, the moderating effect of psychological empowerment was found to be insignificant for two of the seven dimensions of ethical leadership.

This study contributes to highlighting new perspectives of women empowerment. Moreover, it also uncovers psychological factor that influences manager-subordinate relationship using cognitive evaluation theory. The seven dimensions of ethical leadership have not been tested in the past studies (only identified, not tested separately).