Angels and Demons: The Effect of Ethical Leadership on Machiavellian Employees’ Work Behaviors

Abstract

Machiavellians can be characterized as goal-driven people who are willing to use all possible means to achieve their ends, and employees scoring high on Machiavellianism are thus predisposed to engage in unethical and organizationally undesirable behaviors. We propose that leadership can help to manage such employees in a way that reduces undesirable and increases desirable behaviors. Studies on the effects of leadership styles on Machiavellian employees are scarce. Here we investigate the relationship of ethical leadership with prosocial (helping colleagues or affiliative OCB) and antisocial work behavior (knowledge hiding and emotional manipulation) for employees who are higher or lower in Machiavellianism. The effect of an ethical leadership style on employees predisposed to engage in unethical behaviors has not been investigated so far. In a cross-sectional multi-source survey study among a sample of 159 unique leader–follower dyads, we find interaction effects between leadership and employee Machiavellianism for prosocial and antisocial work behavior. As expected, employee Machiavellianism comes with reduced helping behavior and increased knowledge hiding and emotional manipulation, but only when ethical leadership is low. Under highly ethical leaders, such increases in organizationally undesirable behaviors of Machiavellian employees do not occur. While the cross-sectional design precludes conclusions about the direction of causality, findings of our study suggest to further explore (and from a practical perspective to invest in) ethical leadership as a potential remedy for undesirable behavior of Machiavellian employees.

Corruption, Fast or Slow? Ethical Leadership Interacts With Machiavellianism to Influence Intuitive Thinking and Corruption

“…Accordingly, high-Machs do not always engage in unethical behavior, but only when they feel that it is a way to achieve their goals (Kuyumcu and Dahling, 2014). Under some circumstances, Machiavellianism can even be positive for organizations because Machs may find it serves them to adapt their behavior in such a way that it benefits the organization (Belschak et al, 2015(Belschak et al, , 2018. For instance, high-Machs have been shown to engage in more citizenship behaviors when having a transformational leader (Belschak et al, 2015) and to show better task performance when faced with inadequate resources (Kuyumcu and Dahling, 2014).…”

“…Moreover, our findings show that ethical leaders can create a context in which people intuitively refrain from choosing unethical behavior in corruption-related dilemmas and thereby hopefully change the engagement in corrupt behavior, especially for employees whose intuition would promote such behavior, such as employees with high-Mach. Previous work (Belschak et al, 2018;Ruiz-Palomino and Linuesa-Langreo, 2018) suggested that by applying ethical leadership, leaders could bring high-Machs to reduce their tendencies to engage in unethical behavior. However, our experimental results of Study 2 indicate that ethical leadership was marginally more efficient in reducing unethical tendencies in low-Machs than in high-Machs.…”

“…Previous research has evidenced that ethical leadership and Machiavellianism in combination affect both pro-organizational and counterproductive behavior, attributed to factors such as low emotion regulation and egoism ( Belschak et al, 2018 ; Ruiz-Palomino and Linuesa-Langreo, 2018 ). For example, ethical leadership has a stronger negative correlation with knowledge hiding when followers’ Machiavellianism score is high than when followers’ Machiavellianism score is low ( Belschak et al, 2018 ). We extend the previous research on the interaction effect of ethical leadership and Machiavellianism by setting out to establish causality for this effect in the context of a specific counterproductive behavior, namely corruption.…”

“…Moreover, we employ a combination of research methods that help confirm the proposed causality of our proposed relationship (cf. Belschak et al, 2018 ).…”

How Is Ethical Leadership Linked to Subordinate Taking Charge? A Moderated Mediation Model of Social Exchange and Power Distance

“…Although recent researches have indicated that ethical leadership can influence subordinates' work-related behaviors (Garba et al, 2017;Walumbwa et al, 2017;Belschak et al, 2018), we still do not know whether subordinates with different cultural values react to ethical leaderships differently (Zhu et al, 2015). Brown and Mitchell (2010) have shown that differences in subordinates' cultural values (such as power distance) could influence the effect of ethical leadership on subordinates' workrelated outcomes.…”