Moral Leadership Impact On Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior

The complexity of human behavior and job diversity has led to a growth in a new phenomenon known as unethical pro-organizational behavior,which has caught the attention of behavioral scientists.As a fairly new concept,there is a lack of adequate research in this area of organizational psychology.The ability to undermine the mutual trust built up between people and to harm the reputation of a social group or organization are two important effects of unethical pro-organizational behavior in the business sector.A further definition of unethical behavior in the workplace is behavior that violates the organization’s moral standards.This thesis’ s objective is to determine the various factors that influence employees’ engagement in unethical pro-organizational behavior,which is defined as behavior that might be advantageous to the latter.In this study,we examined the indirect impact of moral leadership on unethical pro-organizational behavior(UPB).According to Social Identity Theory,it was proposed that the identification with supervisors(social identity)served as a mediator between moral leadership and UPB.We aim to investigate the moderating role of moral courage in the relationship between moral leadership and UPB.The questionnaires were electronically fully completed based on a sample of 350 personnel who were dispersed throughout various institutional and administrative in the Islamic Republic of Iran.Using two separate samples,we performed two studies: one with 150 employees and the other with 200 employees of Iranian organizations.The interval-bias-corrected indices were obtained using5,000 bootstrap samples by Andrew Hayes(2013)using SPSS Statistics 21,Amos,and Process v3.4.1 to test these theories.This analysis included an assessment of the conditional process.This study’s findings demonstrated that moral leadership improved UPB by encouraging identification with supervisors.The findings also revealed that moral courage decrease or increase the mediating effects of identification with superiors on the relationship between moral leadership and UPB.By proving that moral leadership has paradoxical effects on UPB indirectly through its impact on identification with supervisors,we make a contribution to the literature and provide readers with insight into how and when moral leadership affects UPB.The author argues that organizations should express their intentions and actions to reduce such behavioral tendencies.The article is expected to help further research in this area by summarizing the highlights from existing works available.The results of this research have been elaborated in the following sections of this paper.