The Effect Of Ethical Leadership On Job Satisfaction: Emotional Labor As A Cross-Level Moderator

Job satisfaction has always been one of hot spots in organizational behavior. The studies on influencing factors are especially fruitful. When employee evaluates his job satisfaction, he will think about the work, pay, the most important one, leader. If we know how leadership style and leader’s emotion will affect the subordinators’ job satisfaction, the leader can use the right style and proper emotion to improve his leader effectiveness. Ethical leadership is getting more and more attention.Chinese, from ancient time to the present, value morality and ability, especially the ethics and morals. However, research on ethical leadership style is still on the start-up period in China, and the studies combined emotional labor theory with ethical leadership are not enough. This paper which analyzed the influence of ethical leadership on subordinators’ job satisfaction in the context of emotional labor and at the same time, offered some advice to leaders according to the results contributed a lot to the related theories, so it had important theoretical and practical significance.On the basis of literature relevant to ethical leadership, emotional labor and job satisfaction, the author proposed the research questions: Whether will the ethical leadership influences the subordinators’ job satisfactions? When leader with ethical leadership performs emotional labor, what will the subordinates’ job satisfaction be? How it happens? Based on the social learning theory and emotional infection theory, the author proposed 3 hypotheses and a multilevel model: Ethical leadership is positively related to the subordinates’ job satisfaction and the relationship is moderated by the emotional labor strategies of leader.After determining the object, designing 2 kinds of questionnaires and visiting 6 companies, the author collected a sample(n=164). Coefficient alpha, EFA, CFA and HLM were applied to test the hypotheses. Finally all of the hypotheses were supported: 1. Ethical leadership is positively related to the subordinators’ job satisfaction. 2. Surface acting and deep acting, the emotional labor strategies, is separately positively related to the subordinators’ employee job satisfaction, deep acting has a larger influence. 3. Surface acting and deep acting as group variables, influence the relationship between the ethical leadership and the subordinators’ job satisfaction. The relationship will be weak if leader perform surface acting and deep acting.