Ethical Leadership And Employee Voice: Examining The Mediating Role Of Role-Breadth Self Efficacy

Recently, managerial corruption and greed have been endemic in businessorganizations. Researchers gradually realize that leaders’ unethical behaviormay not only harm one specific organization, but also hurt the whole socialwelfare. Therefore, there are more and more research attentions have been paidto ethical issues in management. Many scholars have found that ethicalleadership plays an important role in promoting employees’ job attitude andworking performance. The main purpose of this study is to focus on therelationship between ethical leadership and employee voice.Drawing on self-theory, the study firstly proposes role-breadth self-efficacyas a mediator for the relationship between ethical leadership and employee voice.In the study, I argue that ethical leadership will influence subordinates’self-concept (i.e., role-breadth self-efficacy, RBSE), which in turn leads toemployee voice behaviors. Furthermore, I include team competition climate as aboundary condition for the proposed indirect relationships among ethicalleadership, self-concept and employee voice.Drawing on survey data from359Chinese employees, I found thatemployee’s RBSE mediated the relationship between ethical leadership andemployee voice behavior. The results also showed that, as expected, teamcompetition climate moderated the relationship between ethical leadership andRBSE. Following the procedures of testing a moderated-mediation modelproposed by Edwards and Lambert (2007), I further found that the proposedindirect relationship in this study (i.e., ethical leadership---RBSE---voice) wasmoderated by team competition climate.In sum, the study successfully links ethical leadership with employee voiceand reveals the psychological process that ethical leaders actively motivatesubordinates’ self-concept and promote employees’ self-confidence, and thus,employees are willing to speak up. Meanwhile, my results suggest that teamcompetition climate would increase employees’ sensitivity to ethical leadership.Under higher level competition climate, employees paid more attention to leaders’ethical behavior, their self-confidence was improved more significantly, and their voice behavior was increased at the end. In the final chapter, contributions andlimitations about the dissertation are discussed.