Leaders on a moral pedestal

Abstract

Morality has long been recognized as critical to leadership. However, compared to a leader’s (im)moral conduct in the professional domain (i.e., professional morality), there has been relatively less attention paid to leadership morality in the personal domain (i.e., private morality); whether and how much lay people care about the (im)morality in a leader’s personal life remains largely underexplored. Drawing upon a culturally attuned perspective on leadership, in six studies (N = 1668) we found that compared to the individualistic culture of North America, the collectivistic culture of East Asia tends to place greater emphasis on a leader’s private morality. Using both measurement of mediation and controlled experiments, we identified people’s conception of an organization (i.e., declarative cultural knowledge) and thinking style (i.e., procedural cultural knowledge) as the mechanisms underlying the differences. Specifically, we found that compared to the North Americans, East Asians are more likely to adopt a relational (vs. transactional) view of an organization and think more holistically (vs. analytically), which in turn lead to greater importance ascribed to leadership private morality. This paper extends prior theory by advancing our understandings of how cultural knowledge shapes people’s lay theories of leadership.