How does ethical leadership flow

Several indexes of the confirmatory factor analysis were within a reasonable range, indicating that this scale was appropriate for using in this study.

Second, we explained the definition of organizational citizenship behavior to employees based on the classic literature by Organ , and then listed several typical organizational citizenship behaviors in the workplace e. The organizational citizenship behavior motivation scale developed by Rioux and Penner was used, and the organizational concern motivation dimension was used as the moderating variable.

Since age and gender may have an impact on the results Resick et al. Moreover, employees from diverse sets of organizations differ in nature may have different expectations for organizational citizenship behaviors and differ in the requirements for academic qualifications.

We speculated that these variables would affect the findings and so type of work organization and education were also used as control variables.

Here, we used dummy variables to encode the type of work organization, public funding involved coded 1, and no public funding involved coded 0. As all the data were obtained via self-report, there may be common method deviation. Therefore, we adopted Harman single factor analysis to carry out exploratory factor analysis for all the items across the four variables.

The four common factors extracted were consistent with the number of variables set in this study, and the variability of the first factor was In addition, data were obtained anonymously, and the research procedures were strictly controlled to control the common method deviation.

AMOS The results of the confirmatory factor analysis are shown in Table 2. This confirmed that the factors of ethical leadership, organizational citizenship anxiety, well-being at work, and organizational concern motivation have good discriminative validity.

Table 3 shows mean, standard deviation, and correlation coefficient. That is, ethical leadership is significantly and positively related to organizational citizenship anxiety perceived by employees. This provided the basis for further testing the research hypotheses. The coefficients of the two are in opposite directions. The organizational concern motivation of employees plays an interfering moderating role between perceived organizational citizenship anxiety and well-being at work, supporting our hypothesis.

Figure 2 was then modified to show the direction and trend of the moderating effect more intuitively. Compared with employees with high organizational concern motivation, organizational citizenship anxiety has a more significant impact on the well-being at work of employees with low organizational concern motivation.

The moderating variable of organization concern motivation was divided into three groups: high, medium, and low, according to the mean plus or minus one standard deviation, to compare the mediating effect of organizational citizenship anxiety between ethical leadership and well-being at work at different levels of organizational concern motivation. The results are shown in Table 5. This shows that the lower the organizational concern motivation, the more significant the mediating effect of organizational citizenship anxiety between ethical leadership and well-being at work.

Therefore, our hypothesis was supported. Employees who work under ethical leadership will perceive supportive, trusting, and positive treatment from leaders. Accordingly, they will feel more positively about their work, such as experiencing higher work satisfaction Bedi et al. However, research by Yang found that working under ethical leadership is not necessarily positive and may even be harmful to employees.

The data were collected through questionnaire surveys of employees across 12 institutions in Hainan, China. It was found that ethical leadership will lead to employees experiencing organizational citizenship anxiety, which will reduce their well-being at work.

The organizational citizenship anxiety perceived by employees is a mediator on how ethical leadership negatively affects well-being at work and it plays a fully mediating role.

When employees engage in organizational citizenship behaviors, their organizational concern motivation moderates the relationship between organizational citizenship anxiety and well-being at work. For employees with high organizational concern motivation, the mediating role of organizational citizenship anxiety is weak.

The theoretical contributions of this research are mainly reflected in three ways. Most of these studies considered the positive impact of specific leadership styles on organizations and employees from the perspective of the leaders, as well as the work tasks undertaken by employees in the organization, including the promotion of effective organization operations, employee advice, and active behavior Song and Xia, ; Walumbwa et al.

However, few studies have explored the cost of working under ethical leadership from the perspective of employees, which reduces well-being at work.

This study focused on the well-being of employees, using TWA to verify the other side of ethical leadership, which enriches the theoretical understanding of employee well-being at work. Second, a more complete mechanism was constructed by introducing organizational citizenship anxiety. The dark side of ethical leadership has been discussed Yang, , enlightening us to further explore the negative effect of ethical leadership.

This study used TWA to explain the mechanism through which ethical leadership has a negative impact on employee well-being at work, and tested the mediating effect of organizational citizenship anxiety in the relationship between ethical leadership and employee well-being at work.

It confirmed that ethical leadership reduces employee well-being at work by increasing organizational citizenship anxiety, further validated the conclusions by Yang , and explained why ethical leadership is negatively related to employee well-being at work.

Eisenbeiss summarized four core ethical orientations of ethical leadership, two of which are responsibility and sustainability orientation, and moderation orientation.

Moderation orientation emphasizes that leaders should be modest, temperate, and self-controlled, have the ability to suppress self-emotions and desires, and can sacrifice their own interests for the goals of the organization or relevant stakeholders. Research by Mao et al. Although meta-analysis of Hoch et al. Organizational citizenship behavior contains a strong ethical element Yam et al. Therefore, organizational citizenship behavior is selected as the entry point in the study because employees that work under ethical leadership engage in organizational citizenship behaviors and cater to the value orientations of ethical leadership.

In this context, introducing organizational citizenship anxiety to build a theoretical model explains the negative effects of ethical leadership, can enhance our understanding of the effects of ethical leadership. In this study, the moderating role of organizational concern motivation is elaborated and verified.

First, ethical leadership is gradually becoming the most important factor affecting the positive performance of employees, including the provision of continuous investment and interpersonal help Song and Xia, This study considered the psychological feelings related to positive performance in employees to explore whether there is another side of the leadership style favored by contemporary organizations. In the other words, we tested whether it would lead to negative effects, more specifically, whether ethical leadership encourages employees to engage in organizational citizenship behaviors that will produce state anxiety and reduce well-being at work.

Our findings confirmed that ethical leadership is an organizational situation that causes organizational citizenship anxiety in employees.

Therefore, managers should try to avoid arranging work tasks that may cause employee state anxiety and leading to difficult organizational citizenship behaviors. Second, ethical leaders should recognize and deal with the negative psychological feelings that employees may have when respond to work tasks related to organizational citizenship behaviors. Previous studies have suggested that state anxiety generated in the workplace is costly, and employees with state anxiety are more likely to experience emotional failure, leading to lower levels of work performance Ford et al.

Therefore, for employees with organizational citizenship anxiety, if it is difficult to prevent them from engaging in organizational citizenship behaviors, it is necessary to provide them with more relevant resources to engage in organizational citizenship behavior and thus compensate for the loss of self-control resources resulting from state anxiety.

Organizational concern motivation is more determined by organizational context. When employees engage in organizational citizenship behaviors based on organizational concern motivation, they will show a strong desire to help the organization and a high level of organizational commitment provided that the organization provides them with satisfying organizational support Bolino and Turnley, If an organization wants to increase the level of organizational concern motivation of employees, it needs to provide more cognitive interventions for employees to strengthen this motivation for example, the organization can improve the knowledge and expertise of employees through education and training, so that employees can feel the support and help from the organization, and improve their intuitive and deliberate consideration, so as to increase the level of organizational concern motivation; strengthening the communication between employees through collective activities can let employees get help from other colleagues, also can enhance the level of organizational concern motivation , also needs to pay attention to screening employees with low organizational concern motivation during recruitment.

First, we performed hypothesis testing using the collected time-crossed data, the negative effects of ethical leadership may not be completely accurate.

Collecting leadership-employee pairing data and conducting further longitudinal research would be beneficial. The second limitation is that although we considered potential influencing factors such as organizational citizenship anxiety, organizational concern motivation, and demographic information, we did not consider any other variables that may affect the negative impact of ethical leadership on employee well-being at work, such as job insecurity Mahlagha and Faizan, , or the quality of coworker exchange and leader-member exchange McCarthy et al.

Organizational citizenship behavior, trait anxiety, negative affect, or neuroticism, may also influence the relationship between ethical leadership and employee well-being at work.

Therefore, future research should explore more variables to improve the theoretical model. It cannot fully reveal the extent of the negative effects of ethical leadership. Future research should further enrich the research on the negative effects of ethical leadership by introducing alternative dependent variables, and also verify the conclusions of this study.

Fourth, the meta-analysis of Hoch et al. Therefore, it is suggested that subsequent research should analyze the influence of transformational leadership on organizational citizenship anxiety, and subsequently further expand the conclusions of this research study.

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author. The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Hainan University. All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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