Utilizing role theory, we investigate the potential negative relationship between employees’ moral ownership and their creativity, and the mitigating effect of ethical leadership in this relationship. We argue that employees higher on moral ownership are likely to take more moral role responsibility to ensure the ethical nature of their own actions and their environment, inadvertently resulting in them being less able to think outside of the box and to be creative at work. However, we propose that ethical leaders can relieve these employees from such moral agent role, allowing them to be creative while staying moral. We adopt a multimethod approach and test our predictions in 2 field studies (1 dyadic-based from the United States and 1 team-based from China) and 2 experimental studies (1 scenario-based and 1 team-based laboratory study). The results across these studies showed: (a) employee moral ownership is negatively related to employee creativity, and (b) ethical leadership moderates this relationship such that the negative association is mitigated when ethical leadership is high rather than low. Moreover, the team-based laboratory study demonstrated that moral responsibility relief mediated the buffering effect of ethical leadership. We discuss implications for role theory, ethicality, creativity, and leadership at work.

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We developed and tested a research model in which employee well‐being human resource (HR) attribution differentially influences the intention to change jobs across organizations (i.e., external job change intention) versus that within the same organization (i.e., internal job change intention). Furthermore, we posited that task idiosyncratic deals (I‐deals) moderated the relationships between employee well‐being HR attribution and external and internal job change intentions. Results indicated that employee well‐being HR attribution was negatively related to external job change intention, but positively related to internal job change intention. Further, task I‐deals significantly moderated the relationships between employee well‐being HR attribution and external and internal job change intention. Specifically, employee well‐being HR attribution played a less important role in reducing external job change intention when task I‐deals were high rather than low. On the other hand, high task I‐deals significantly strengthened the positive relationship between employee well‐being HR attribution and internal job change intention. Our study extends the careers literature by differentiating the impact of employee well‐being HR attribution on job change intentions within an organization compared with that across organizations and the important role of supervisors in enhancing or mitigating these effects.

Although a number of studies have examined the antecedents of employee voice, knowledge on the consequences of voice, especially in terms of the coworkers' responses, is limited. The current research addresses this important issue by examining when and why employee voice, as a citizenship behavior, can facilitate coworker support. Drawing on expectancy violation theory, we propose that higher job demands strengthen the positive relationship between employee voice and coworker support by decreasing coworker voice expectation. We tested our hypotheses using two complementary studies: Study 1 adopted an experience sampling methodology and collected data consisting of 944 daily responses from 103 employees over a 10-day period; Study 2 adopted a two-wave survey design and collected data from 161 employee-coworker dyads. The results support our hypotheses that higher (versus lower) job demands enhance the positive association between employee voice and coworker support via decreased (versus increased) coworker voice expectation.

Narcissism is widely considered to be a trait that is commonly found in leaders, but also a characteristic that is frequently a source of problems for their organizations. However, there is accumulating consensus in the organizational literature that, rather than a necessary evil, narcissism can potentially be a mixed blessing for leaders. The present study sets out to reconcile the paradoxical effects of leader narcissism by exploring when and how leader narcissism hampers or helps follower job performance. Utilizing a social cognitive approach to leadership and drawing upon the inferential model of leadership perceptions, we propose that leader effectiveness can shape followers’ dual collective leadership perceptions in response to leader narcissism and that these shared perceptions in turn influence follower job performance in opposing manners. The results of multi-wave, multi-source, and multilevel data showed that when leader narcissism was accompanied by low levels of leader effectiveness, followers collectively tended to perceive their leaders as being more narcissistic. However, when leader narcissism was accompanied by high levels of leader effectiveness, followers collectively tended to perceive their leaders as more charismatic. Followers’ dual collective leadership perceptions then mediated the joint effects of leader narcissism and leader effectiveness on follower job performance.