An Exploration of How Ethical Leaders Mitigate the Deviance of Dispositionally Dishonest Employees

Abstract

There is growing consensus among behavioral ethics scholars that ethical leadership is a potent solution for addressing unethical and deviant behaviors in the workplace. However, while the evidence to date shows that ethical leadership generally reduces employee misconduct, it is not clear how ethical leaders influence those most likely to engage in misconduct – i.e., dispositionally dishonest employees (or low Honesty-Humility, HH; Ashton & Lee, 2004). Drawing on Brown et al.’s (2005) theory of ethical leadership, we test two distinct theoretical explanations: a) the moral cognitive perspective, which argues that ethical leaders reduce the unethical behaviors of low HH employees by positively shaping their moral cognitions (e.g., moral attentiveness and awareness, moral judgment, moral motivation, and moral disengagement) of low HH employees or b) the trait suppression perspective, which argues that ethical leaders simply suppress or constrain low HH employees’ natural expression of unethical behavior through reinforcements. Across four studies investigating five moral cognitions, we found little support for the moral cognitive explanation. In contrast, we find evidence that ethical leaders primarily mitigate low HH employees’ unethical behaviors by influencing their perceptions that deviant behaviors are not tolerated (i.e., suppressed) in the workplace. We discuss the implications of these findings.