The Study On The Effect Of Ethical Leadership On Employees’ Unethical Behavior

Excessive emphasized on commercial interests, the organizations lacking of moral decline often are confronted with decline and collapse. Contemporary companies are plagued by ethical problems such as stealing, cheating and abuse of resources etc. These employees’unethical behaviors have been found to bring a huge damage to companies. As such, the interest in employee unethical behaviors should come as no surprise in both research and in the workplace. How to prevent unethical behavior effectively in the organizations of employees is particularly important and urgent. Therefore, both in the management practice and theoretical research, to explore the influence factor of employees’unethical behavior in the organization has become hot concerns. Previous studies have recognized that both organizational factors and individual factors can affect employee unethical behaviors, but few of these studies have considered their effects on unethical behaviors jointly. Thus, to better understand the mechanisms underlying employee unethical behavior, this study proposed and tested a moderated mediation model in which ethical leadership (organizational factor) influences employees’unethical behavior, with ethical climate (organizational factor) as a mediator and collectivism (individual factor) as a moderator. However, up to now, there is little research on employees’ unethical behavior in Chinese cultural background, and the exploration of the concepts and dimensions of unethical behavior is still in a fledging period. What’s more, there is no local scale to explore unethical behavior’s influencing factors.Therefore, this study attempted to investigate the dimension and structure of employees’unethical behavior in the workplace and to develop its local scale in the Chinese organizational context, then we designed a moderated mediation model to analyze the mechanism how ethical leadership to impact on employees’ unethical behavior. At first, we introduced the research results about unethical behavior, ethical leadership, organizational ethical climate and collectivism to make a literature review the proposed hypotheses. Empirical study made a questionnaire survey, using SPSS and Amos statistical software for data analysis and hypotheses test. Finally, we draw some valuable conclusions and gave some human resource management practices recommendations for references.The main conclusions are as follows: (1) Based on the motivation (emotion and interest) and the object (organizational and interpersonal) of behaviors, we classified unethical behavior into four types. Empirical research reach the conclusion that unethical behavior is a conception with a five-dimensional structure, namely interpersonal political behavior, malicious opposite behavior, slacking behavior, not whistle blowing behavior and greedy selfish behavior.(2) Ethical leadership is negatively related to employees’unethical behavior. This is in the Chinese cultural context, developing the ethical standards can effectively suppress the occurrence of unethical behavior.(3) Organizational ethical climate has a significant impact on employees’ unethical behavior, including self-interested organizational ethical climate will lead to the occurrence of the employees’unethical behavior, and caring and rule-based organizational ethical climate will reduce the reduction of unethical behavior. This suggests that the employees in the organization perceived organizational ethical climate will affect their ethical decision-making and behavior, so as to promote or inhibit the occurrence of unethical behavior.(4) Organizational ethical climate, including the self-interested, Caring and rule based, totally mediated the relationship between the ethical leadership of organization and the employees’ unethical behavior. Description Ethical Leadership on unethical behavior of employees through the organization of ethical climate, ethical leadership will create a good organizational ethical climate, inhibit the spread of negative attitudes and beliefs in the organization, thereby affecting the employees’ ethical decision-making and behavior.(5) Collectivism buffered the effect of organizational ethical climate on employees’unethical behavior, and moderated the mediated relationship through organizational ethical climate. That is, depend on the level of collectivism; there are differences in the impact of ethical leadership on employees’unethical behavior through organizational ethical climate.