What Benefits Do Ethical Leaders Gain? Ethical Leadership, LMX Mean and Leaders’ Benefits

Abstract

Prior studies focused on the relationships between ethical leadership and outcomes benefit for organization and employees, however, the relationship between ethical leadership and outcomes benefit for leaders was ignored to some extent. Base on the social exchange theory, this study examined the main effects ethical leadership on their benefits at individual and group level as well as the mechanism between them. The self-report questionnaires of 248 employees from 50 work groups were collected, and statistic results showed that the common method bias had little impact on the main effects and mediation models. The Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM) was applied to examine the mediations at individual level and cross level while the STATA was used to examine the mediations at group level. Sobel test and MCMAM were employed to calculate the indirect effect of mediations. The results showed that: (1) Ethical leadership was positively related to the employee cognitive and affective trust in leader. (2) Ethical leadership was positively related to the group and leader performance. (3) LMX Mean mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and subordinate's cognitive and affective trust in leader. (4) LMX Mean mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and group performance, but such mediation between ethical leadership and leader performance wasn't supported. The present study indicated that ethical leadership won the subordinate's cognitive and affective trust at individual level and group and leader performance at group level. Moreover, the ethical leadership gained benefits through building high group-level social exchange quality. In application, ethical leadership benefits organization, employees and leaders, it should be encouraged in managerial practice. Furthermore, the ethical leadership should develop high group leader-member exchange quality to facilitating the employee and group outcomes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved). (journal abstract)