Abstract
In the aftermath of various corporate scandals, management research and practice have taken great interest in ethical leadership. Ethical leadership is referred to as “normatively appropriate conduct” (Brown et al. in Organ Behav Hum Decis Process 97(2):117–134, 2005), but the prescriptive norms that actually underlie this understanding constitute an open question. We address this research gap by turning to relational models theory (Fiske in Structures of social life: the four elementary forms of human relations, Free Press, New York, 1991), which contextualizes four distinct moralities in four distinct interactional norms (i.e., the relational models). We expect that the norms inherent in each model dictate the type of leader relationship that followers deem ethical. Specifically, we hypothesize that, for each norm, followers will perceive leaders as less ethical the more discrepant, i.e., the more incongruent, followers’ ideal relational norm is with the perceived norm that they attribute to their actual leader–follower interaction. We tested the respective incongruence hypothesis in a cross-sectional survey of 101 Dutch employees. Polynomial regression and surface response analyses provide support for the hypothesized incongruence effects in each of the four relational models, suggesting that normatively appropriate conduct should not be limited to caring (i.e., community-oriented) behaviors. Indeed, all four relational models can predict ethical leadership perceptions. We discuss the implications in the context of ethical leadership research and managerial practice.
Highlights
With corporate fraud and corruption scandals making the headlines, corporate leaders have come under increasing pressure to reinforce business ethics (e.g., Mukherjee 2016; Sherman 2017)
The corresponding relational models (RMs) within each measure correlate at a moderate level, which suggests that, on average, our respondents work in leader–follower relationships that do not always meet their ideal leader relationship concept
Because we assessed the predictors using two variants of the RM measures, we have reported the results in two corresponding sections
Summary
With corporate fraud and corruption scandals making the headlines, corporate leaders have come under increasing pressure to reinforce business ethics (e.g., Mukherjee 2016; Sherman 2017). In order to delineate the normative foundation of ethical leadership, Giessner and Van Quaquebeke (2010) proposed a relational framework that the present study elaborates on and empirically supports They rely on relational models theory (Fiske 1991; Haslam 2004) mainly for two reasons: First, it provides a comprehensive and exhaustive taxonomy of social relations and may offer meaningful insights into the dynamics of follower–leader interactions. By testing whether each moral normset (i.e., each relational model) may serve as a reference framework for ethical leader evaluations, we are able to scrutinize Brown and colleagues’ key assumption about the normative nature of ethical leadership
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