Standing in customers’ shoes: How responsible leadership inhibits unethical pro-organizational behavior

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Ken Cheng¹  Limin Guo²  Yinghui Lin³  Panpan Hu¹  Changchang Hou¹  Jiaying He¹ 

[1] School of Management, Zhejiang University of Technology;School of Economics and Management, Tongji University;School of Management, Shanghai University

关键词: customer-oriented perspective taking;    Leader competence;    Responsible leadership;    social information processing theory;    Unethical pro-organizational behavior;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1019734

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Although the negative impact of responsible leadership on employees’ unethical pro-organizational Although the negative impact of responsible leadership on employees’ unethical pro-organizational behavior has been documented in the literature, little is known about its underlying processes and boundaries. Drawing on social information processing theory and social learning theory, we built a moderated mediation model to explain why and when unethical pro-organizational behavior could be inhibited by responsible leadership. We conducted a two-phase questionnaire survey to collect data. The empirical results based on the sample of 557 Chinese salespeople showed that customer-oriented perspective taking partially mediated the negative link between responsible leadership and unethical pro-organizational behavior and that leader competence strengthened the direct effects of responsible leadership on customer-oriented perspective taking and unethical pro-organizational behavior as well as the indirect effect of responsible leadership on unethical pro-organizational behavior via customer-oriented perspective taking. These findings enrich the current understanding of how responsible leadership relates to unethical pro-organizational behavior, extend the limited literature on customer-oriented perspective taking, and offer some suggestions that managers can follow to inhibit unethical pro-organizational behavior. Limitations and future research directions are also discussed.

【 授权许可】

CC BY