How Servant Leadership Influences Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Roles of LMX, Empowerment and Proactive Personality

While the link between servant leadership and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has been established, the individual-level mechanisms underlying this relationship and its boundary conditions remain poorly understood. In this study, we investigate the salience of the mediating mechanisms of leader-member exchange (LMX) and psychological empowerment in explaining the process by which servant leaders elicit discretionary OCB among followers. We also examine the role of followers’ proactive personality in moderating the indirect effects of servant leadership on OCB through LMX and psychological empowerment. Analysis of survey data collected from 446 supervisor-subordinate dyads in a large Chinese multinational firm suggests that while servant leadership is positively related to subordinate OCB through LMX, psychological empowerment does not explain any additional variance in OCB above that accounted for by LMX. Moderated mediation tests confirm the moderating effect of proactive personality through LMX. By providing a nuanced understanding of how and when servant leadership leads followers to go above and beyond their job role, our study assists organizations in deciding how to develop and utilize servant leaders in their organizations

How does ethical leadership trickle down? Test of an integrative dual-process model

Although the trickle-down effect of ethical leadership has been documented in the literature, its underlying mechanism still remains largely unclear. To address this gap, we develop a cross-level dual-process model to explain how the effect occurs. Drawing on social learning theory, we hypothesize that the ethical leadership of high-level managers could cascade to middle-level supervisors via its impact on middle-level supervisors’ two ethical expectations. Using a sample of 69 middle-level supervisors and 381 subordinates across 69 sub-branches from a large banking firm in China, we found that middle-level supervisors’ ethical efficacy expectation and unethical behavior–punishment expectation (as one form of ethical outcome expectations) accounted for the trickle-down effect. The explanatory role of middle-level supervisors’ ethical behavior–reward expectation (as the other form of ethical outcome expectations), however, was not supported. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed

Teaching Implicit Leadership Theories to develop leaders and leadership – How and why it can make a difference

Implicit leadership theories (ILTs) are lay images of leadership, which are individually and socially determined. We discuss how teaching ILTs contributes to developing leaders and leaderships by raising self- and social awareness for the contexts in which leadership takes place. We present and discuss a drawing exercise to illustrate different ILTs and discuss the implications for leaders and leadership, with a particular focus on how leaders claim, and are granted, leader identities in groups

How authentic leadership influences team performance:the mediating role of team reflexivity

This study examines how authentic leadership influences team performance via the mediating mechanism of team reflexivity. Adopting a self-regulatory perspective, we propose that authentic leadership will predict the specific team regulatory process of reflexivity, which in turn will be associated with two outcomes of team performance; effectiveness and productivity. Using survey data from 53 teams in three organizations in the United Kingdom and Greece and controlling for collective trust, we found support for our stated hypotheses with the results indicating a significant fully mediated relationship. As predicted the self-regulatory behaviors inherent in the process of authentic leadership served to collectively shape team behavior, manifesting in the process of team reflexivity, which, in turn, positively predicted team performance. We conclude with a discussion of how this study extends theoretical understanding of authentic leadership in relation to teamwork and delineate several practical implications for leaders and organizations

Leadership and Persistency in Spontaneous Dishonesty

Extensive evidence shows that when given the opportunity, people cheat for monetary rewards, but only to the extent that they can keep a positive selfconcept. In this study, we investigate various factors that may influence the degree to which people can keep their positive self-concept while cheating for monetary gains. We find that authentic leadership, gender, cheating norm, experience of cheating, and expectations of others' cheating behavior have no effect on participants' spontaneous dishonesty on an abstract task. Therefore, reducing people's cheating behavior might be a long-term project for the management of fraudulent organizations and more difficult than might be expected

Toward a Unified Framework of Perceived Negative Leader Behaviors Insights from French and British Educational Sectors

In this paper, we challenge the commonly held assumption that actors in the education sector are largely ethical, and that there is therefore little need to scrutinize leader behaviors in this sector. We also overcome past scholars’ tendencies to either focus selectively on positive leader behaviors, or to stay content with categorizing leader behaviors into effective and ineffective (if at all they do focus on negative leader behaviors). Using data (Critical Incidents) from three case studies previously conducted in eight British and French academic establishments, we show that not only do negative leader behaviors abound in the education sector, but they can also be differentiated into three types: (1) behaviors emanating from leaders’ lack of functional skills i.e., ineffective behaviors, (2) behaviors emanating from leaders’ insouciance toward harming the organization and its members i.e., dysfunctional behaviors, and (3) behaviors emanating from leaders’ lack of honesty, integrity, ethicality, and transparency i.e., unauthentic behaviors. We enrich current understanding on ineffective, dysfunctional, and unauthentic leader behaviors, and offer a unified (yet differentiated) framework of negative leader behaviors in the academic sector. Since each type of negative behavior emanates from different motivational drivers, different measures are required to curb them. These are also discussed. A comparison of our findings with those from leadership studies in other sectors reveals that negative leader behaviors in the education sector are quite similar to those in other sectors