بررسی سه گانه اثرات آبشار رهبری اخلاقی بر نتایج کارکنان: یک تحلیل میانجیگری مدون A three-level examination of the cascading effects of ethical leadership on employee outcomes: A moderated mediation analysis

1. Introduction Various instances in which leaders have behaved unethically have resulted in a series of negative impacts on their respective firms and stakeholders. Varying from large corporate scandals to the less-sensational withholding behaviors of employees, these impacts reduce productivity and result in financial losses to firms (Bello, 2012). Beyond these direct harms (Kacmar, Bachrach, Harris, & Zivnuska, 2011), the proliferation of unethical behaviors in one organization can, like a proverbial “rotten apple,” potentially spread to other organizations and then into society as a whole (Treviño & Youngblood, 1990). For this reason, ethical leadership, which is conceptualized as a leader’s display of normatively appropriate conduct and the promotion of such conduct among his or her followers (Brown, Treviño, & Harrison, 2005), has become an increasingly important and popular topic in both the media and academia (Treviño, Weaver, & Reynolds, 2006). Over the past decade, the study of ethical leadership has grown rapidly (cf., Ng & Feldman, 2015), with one research branch focusing on the effects of ethical leadership on the positive or negative organizational behaviors of followers. According to a recent meta-analysis by Hoch, Bommer, Dulebohn, and Wu (2018), ethical leadership improves desirable employee outcomes, such as organizational citizenship behaviors, job satisfaction, employee engagement, and organizational commitment, and also reduces employee deviance and turnover intentions. Although these studies contribute to our understanding of the significance of ethical leadership for achieving desirable performance outcomes, much less is known about the specific processes through which ethical leadership elicits these effects. Researchers have only developed a preliminary understanding of how the influence of ethical leadership trickles down through the organizational hierarchy to in- fluence performance outcomes. Indeed, many researchers have called for studies along this developing line of inquiry (Bedi, Alpaslan, & Green, 2016; Brown & Treviño, 2006a; Ng & Feldman, 2015). According to social learning theory (Bandura, 1977), individuals learn norms and appropriate behaviors by observing the behaviors of others who are credible and attractive. Several researchers have suggested that the ethical behaviors of leaders play a key role in efforts to foster positive, value-driven behaviors in employees (Bedi et al., 2016; Bums, 1978). A number of leadership constructs, such as transformational leadership (Bass, 1985; Bums, 1978), servant leadership (Greenleaf, 1977), and authentic leadership (Avolio & Gardner, 2005), contain elements of ethics. However, these constructs focus on a range of leadership behaviors that do not categorically include clear ethical components, and that therefore may not fully explain the effects of the ethical behaviors and choices of leaders and how those behaviors in- fluence employees (Brown & Treviño, 2006a).