Is unethical leadership a negative for Employees' personal growth and intention to stay? The buffering role of responsibility climate

Abstract

Various forms of unethical leadership are associated with a wide range of negative outcomes, including decreases in subordinates' intention to stay, which is associated with higher turnover, among other negative organizational outcomes. Since the strength of the association between unethical leadership and intent to stay is variable, we examined personal growth satisfaction as a mediator and responsibility climate as a moderator of the relationship. In a Spain-based sample of 150 employees, we found as anticipated, that personal growth satisfaction mediated the negative impact of unethical supervision on intention to stay. In terms of moderation, also as expected, high (versus low) responsibility climate weakened the negative relationship between unethical leadership and subordinates' personal growth satisfaction, as well as the indirect negative impact of unethical leadership on subordinates' intention to stay. Importantly, since unethical leadership is difficult to eliminate totally, our findings are significant because they suggest several ways to minimize its negative effects.

Unethical Leadership: Review, Synthesis and Directions for Future Research

“…For example, Cialdini et al (2021) reverse coded the scale item, 'Sets an example of how to do things the right way in terms of ethics', so that a higher score represented unethical behaviour. The remainder of the studies employed toxic leadership dimensions (Ruiz-Palomino et al, 2021) or organisational and interpersonal deviance (Qin et al, 2021), or they adapted general unethical organisational behaviours to the leadership context (Fehr et al, 2020;Javaid et al, 2020).…”

“…intentions to leave (Charoensap et al, 2018). In addition, these favourable or unfavourable evaluations about the dominant ethical or unethical tone in the organisation, which emanate from social exchange and social learning phenomena, condition followers to exhibit positive and negative work attitudes, respectively (Ruiz-Palomino et al, 2021).…”

“…Thus, unethical leadership is considered detrimental to employees' personal growth satisfaction and intentions to stay (Ruiz-Palomino et al, 2021). Furthermore, employees' perceptions of the desirability of remaining with an organisation depend on the extent to which their leaders work to meet the employees' developmental needs (Ruiz-Palomino et al, 2021). Because unethical leadership weakens such employee perceptions, it is logical to assume that it increases their volition to leave.…”

“…Scholars have gauged the impact of unethical leadership in the domains of employee attitudes, e.g. intentions to stay (Ruiz-Palomino et al, 2021) and intentions to engage in fraudulent acts (Johnson et al, 2017), and employee behaviours, e.g. counterproductive work behaviours (Knoll et al, 2017), crimes of obedience (Carsten & Uhl-Bien, 2013) and knowledge hiding (Qin et al, 2021), among others.…”

Proposing a Robust Model to Reduce Employees’ Turnover Intentions in an Ethical Leadership Framework: Empirical Evidence from the Healthcare Sector

“…They stated that to understand this mechanism, one must explore the relationship between ethical leadership and turnover intentions based on the theoretical underpinning of self-concept theory because the crux of this theory emphasizes that employees are expected to stay in an organization when they believe their leadership is ethical. Conversely, the bulk of the literature has suggested when employees find their leadership unethical, they have higher intentions to quit such organizations [ 50 , 51 ]. Therefore, the above literature can be summarized by stating:…”