Embedding Ethical Leadership within and across Organization Levels
Open accessAbstract
We develop and test a model linking ethical leadership with unit ethical culture, both across and within organizational levels, examining how both leadership and culture relate to ethical cognitions and behaviors of lower-level followers. The data were collected from 2,572 U.S. Army soldiers representing three organizational levels deployed in combat. Findings provide limited support for simple trickle-down mechanisms of ethical leadership but broader support for a multilevel model that takes into account how leaders embed shared understandings through their influence on the ethical culture of units at various levels, which in turn influence followers' ethical cognitions and behavior. The influences of ethical leadership occur not only directly, among immediate followers within a unit, but also indirectly, across hierarchical levels, through the cascading of ethical culture and senior leaders' influences on subordinate leader behavior. We discuss scholarly and practical implications for understanding how leaders transmit ethical influence both down and across large organizations.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
A compliance culture mediates ethical leadership's impact on rule compliance and within-organization whistle-blowing.
“A compliance culture also mediates ethical leadership's impact on rule compliance and withinorganization whistle-blowing (Mayer, Nurmohamed, Treviño, Shapiro, & Schminke, 2013;Schaubroeck et al., 2012).”
From Taking Stock of Moral Approaches to Leadership: An Integrative Review of Ethical, Authentic, and Servant Leadership (2019) · cites this paper as Schaubroeck et al., 2012
Cites
Evaluating Structural Equation Models with Unobservable Variables and Measurement Error
Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981) · Journal of Marketing Research · doi:10.2307/3151312 · Cited by 109,314 · see citing works
Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error
Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981) · Journal of Marketing Research · doi:10.1177/002224378101800104 · Cited by 109,190 · see citing works
Combat Duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mental Health Problems, and Barriers to Care
Hoge, C. W., Castro, C. A., Messer, S. C., McGurk, D., Cotting, D. I., & Koffman, R. L. (2004) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejmoa040603 · Cited by 4,778 · see citing works
IMPACT OF TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP ON FOLLOWER DEVELOPMENT AND PERFORMANCE: A FIELD EXPERIMENT.
Dvir, T., Eden, D., Avolio, B. J., & Shamir, B. (2002) · Academy of Management Journal · doi:10.2307/3069307 · Cited by 1,906 · see citing works
Self-citationHow low does ethical leadership flow? Test of a trickle-down model
Mayer, D. M., Kuenzi, M., Greenbaum, R., Bardes, M., & Salvador, R. (. (2009) · Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2008.04.002 · Cited by 1,598 · see citing works
Walumbwa, F. O., & Schaubroeck, J. (2009) · Journal of Applied Psychology · doi:10.1037/a0015848 · Cited by 1,114 · see citing works
Self-citationImplicit Voice Theories: Taken-for-Granted Rules of Self-Censorship at Work
Detert, J. R., & Edmondson, A. C. (2011) · Academy of Management Journal · doi:10.5465/amj.2011.61967925 · Cited by 998 · see citing works
A disagreement about within-group agreement: disentangling issues of consistency versus consensus
Kozlowski, S. W., & Hattrup, K. (1992) · Journal of Applied Psychology · doi:10.1037/0021-9010.77.2.161 · Cited by 514 · see citing works
Self-citation
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Dinh, J. E., Lord, R. G., Gardner, W. L., Meuser, J. D., Liden, R. C., & Hu, J. (2014) · The Leadership Quarterly · doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.005 · Cited by 1,426 · see citing works
Self-citationA meta-analytic review of ethical leadership outcomes and moderators
Bedi, A., Alpaslan, C. M., & Green, S. (2016) · Journal of Business Ethics · doi:10.1007/s10551-015-2625-1 · Cited by 698 · see citing works
Lemoine, G. J., Hartnell, C. A., & Leroy, H. (2019) · Academy of Management Annals · doi:10.5465/annals.2016.0121 · Cited by 614 · see citing works
E-leadership: Re-examining transformations in leadership source and transmission
Avolio, B. J., Sosik, J. J., Kahai, S. S., & Baker, B. (2014) · The Leadership Quarterly · doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.003 · Cited by 584 · see citing works
Self-citationLeadership in applied psychology: Three waves of theory and research
Lord, R. G., Day, D. V., Zaccaro, S. J., Avolio, B. J., & Eagly, A. H. (2017) · Journal of Applied Psychology · doi:10.1037/apl0000089 · Cited by 461 · see citing works
Self-citationMittal, S., & Dhar, R. L. (2015) · Management Decision · doi:10.1108/md-07-2014-0464 · Cited by 434 · see citing works
Ethical leadership: Meta-analytic evidence of criterion-related and incremental validity.
Ng, T. W. H., & Feldman, D. C. (2015) · Journal of Applied Psychology · doi:10.1037/a0038246 · Cited by 377 · see citing works
Inspired to perform: A multilevel investigation of antecedents and consequences of thriving at work
Walumbwa, F. O., Muchiri, M. K., Misati, E., Wu, C., & Meiliani, M. (2018) · Journal of Organizational Behavior · doi:10.1002/job.2216 · Cited by 323 · see citing works
Den Hartog, D. N. (2015) · Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior · doi:10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032414-111237 · Cited by 324 · see citing works
Kuenzi, M., Mayer, D. M., & Greenbaum, R. L. (2020) · Personnel Psychology · doi:10.1111/peps.12356 · Cited by 300 · see citing works
Braun, S. (2017) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00773 · Cited by 229 · see citing works
Walumbwa, F. O., Hartnell, C. A., & Misati, E. (2017) · Journal of Business Research · doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.11.013 · Cited by 179 · see citing works
Duty orientation: Theoretical development and preliminary construct testing
Hannah, S. T., Jennings, P. L., Bluhm, D., Peng, A. C., & Schaubroeck, J. M. (2014) · Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2013.10.007 · Cited by 117 · see citing works
Self-citationThe Science of Leadership: A theoretical model and research agenda
Carton, A. M. (2022) · Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior · doi:10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-012420-091227 · Cited by 84 · see citing works
Mabey, C., Conroy, M., Blakeley, K., & de Marco, S. (2017) · Journal of Business Ethics · doi:10.1007/s10551-016-3054-5 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
Chen, F., & Wu, Q. L. (2024) · Corporate Communications: An International Journal · doi:10.1108/ccij-03-2023-0029 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
- Authors
- Schaubroeck, J. M., Hannah, S. T., Avolio, B. J., Kozlowski, S. W. J., Lord, R. G., Treviño, L. K., Dimotakis, N., & Peng, A. C.
- Affiliations
- Michigan State University (US)
- Wake Forest University (US)
- University of Akron (US)
- Pennsylvania State University (US)
- Georgia State University (US)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Academy of Management Journal
- Publisher
- Academy of Management
- Published
- 2012-10
- Volume
- 55
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1053-1078
- ISSN
- 0001-4273 (ISSN-L)
- 1948-0989
- OpenAlex
- W1972792003
- Cited by
- 577
- References
- 8
- Citations by year
- 2026: 30 · 2025: 29 · 2024: 38 · 2023: 48 · 2022: 38 · 2021: 38 · 2020: 63 · 2019: 43 · 2018: 41 · 2017: 49 · 2016: 47 · 2015: 40 · 2014: 43 · 2013: 24 · 2012: 5
- FWCI
- 73.81
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Academy of Management Journal (publishedVersion)
- Durham Research Online (Durham University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Ethics in Business and Education
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Leadership and Management in Organizations
- Keywords
- ethical leadership, ethical organizational culture, trickle-down effect, moral cognition, moral behavior, followers, military units, U.S. Army soldiers, combat deployment
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
