The Ethical Regime: Ethical Leadership in Times of Change and Conflict

Empirical research on ethical leadership has mainly focused on its impact on ethical and unethical outcomes. However, little is known about the relations of ethical leadership beyond its linkages with ethical/unethical conduct and prosocial/antisocial behaviors especially on organizational issues that demand urgent ethical attention. Moreover, previous ethical leadership research has somewhat assumed that ethical leaders operate in a stable organizational context. In this dissertation, I address this important gap in the literature by focusing explicitly on the role of ethical leadership in times of organizational change and workplace conflict (Phase 1), while considering the extent to which leaders should estimate follower’s expectations and moral commitment to be effective in encouraging change-facilitating behaviors (Phase 2).

In the first phase, in a cross-sectional field study including 124 employee-coworker-supervisor triads from various organizations in Belgium, I first show that ethical leadership mitigates the implications of organizational change on employees’ turnover intentions by enhancing their state self-esteem. Further, drawing from a cross-sectional and time-lagged design including 165 employee-supervisor dyad and 131 employees working in Belgium and Nigeria respectively, we find that ethical leadership plays an important role in decreasing potentially harmful conflicts that may arise among employees during change processes (i.e., relationship, task, and process conflict). Moreover, I show that ethical leaders encourage employees’ efficacy in resolving conflicts, which underlines the impact of ethical leadership on workplace conflicts. In a second phase, I argue that ethical leadership in itself could be very challenging, especially in the enactment of leader’s moral convictions. Specifically, I propose that ethical leaders are more effective in enhancing change-facilitating behaviors (i.e., more organizational citizenship and less deviant behaviors) at lower levels of leader ethical conviction rather than at higher levels of ethical conviction.  Results obtained from employees in Belgian (N= 185) and Nigerian business contexts (N= 131) support these arguments. 

In sum, this dissertation demonstrates that the impact of ethical leadership transcend beyond existing knowledge by offering important novel insights on the broader influence of ethical leadership in organizations. In the concluding chapter, I discuss the implications for both theory and practice and highlight important directions for moving the field forward.