In this paper, we examine the interactive effects of positive affect and perspective-taking on workplace incivility and family incivility, through moral disengagement. We draw from broaden-and-build and moral disengagement theories to suggest a potential negative consequence of positive affect. Specifically, we argue that positive affect increases incivility toward coworkers and spouses through moral disengagement among employees with low, but not high perspective-taking. Data from two time-lagged field studies and one online experiment provide support for our hypotheses. These findings suggest that (...) the beneficial effects of positive feelings are not universal, and the fostering of positive feelings at work might have unintended negative consequences, namely moral disengagement, and increased incivility at work and at home. Implications for theory and research are discussed. (shrink)

Although thought suppression is a commonly used self-control strategy that has far-reaching consequences, its effect on ethical decision making is unclear. Whereas ironic process theory suggests that suppressing ethics-related thoughts leads to mental rebounds of ethicality and decreased unethical behavior, ego depletion theory suggests that thought suppression can lead to reduced self-control and increased unethical behavior. Integrating the two theories, I propose that the effect of thought suppression on unethical behavior hinges on the content of the suppressed thoughts. Participants who (...) suppressed ethics-related [-unrelated] thoughts engaged in less [more] cyber bullying, cheating, and dishonesty compared to participants in the control conditions. Explicit and implicit moral awareness was found to mediate this moderated effect. Experiment 4 further demonstrated that suppressing ethics-related thoughts reduces self-control performance on a subsequent amoral task, but not on subsequent ethical decision making. (shrink)

Integrating research on empowering leadership with the literature on power in social psychology, we examine how empowering leaders affect the propensity of followers to engage in deviance. Across a multi-source, multi-wave field study and a controlled laboratory experiment, we find that, compared to the followers of less-empowering leaders, the followers of more empowering leaders feel subjectively more powerful and engage in more deviant behaviors. Moreover, we find that the propensity of empowered followers to engage in more deviance depends on their (...) prosocial attributes. Specifically, empowered followers engage in the highest levels of deviance when they have a weak moral identity and a strong desire for dominance. We further find that empowering leadership does not increase follower deviance when followers either have a strong moral identity or a weak desire for dominance. In sum, although past research suggests that empowering leadership may facilitate productivity and employee engagement, our work demonstrates that it can also cultivate harmful effects, such as increased deviance among certain types of followers. We discuss our theoretical contributions as well as practical implications for practicing empowering leadership. (shrink)

Ethical leadership research has primarily relied on social learning and social exchange theories. Although these theories have been generative, additional theoretical perspectives hold the potential to broaden scholars’ understanding of ethical leadership’s effects. In this paper, we examine moral typecasting theory and its unique implications for followers’ leader-directed citizenship behavior. Across two studies employing both survey-based and experimental methods, we offer support for three key predictions consistent with this theory. First, the effect of ethical leadership on leader-directed citizenship behavior is (...) curvilinear, with followers helping highly ethical and highly unethical leaders the least. Second, this effect only emerges in morally intense contexts. Third, this effect is mediated by the follower’s belief in the potential for prosocial impact. Our findings suggest that a follower’s belief that his or her leader is ethical has meaningful, often counterintuitive effects that are not predicted by dominant theories of ethical leadership. These results highlight the potential importance of moral typecasting theory to better understand the dynamics of ethical leadership. (shrink)

We theorize that victim anonymity is an important factor in ethical decision making, such that actors engage in more self-interested and unethical behaviors toward anonymous victims than they do toward identifiable victims. Three experiments provided empirical support for this argument. In Study 1, participants withheld more life-saving products from anonymous than from identifiable victims. In Study 2, participants allocated a sum of payment more unfairly when interacting with an anonymous than with an identifiable partner. Finally, in Study 3, participants cheated (...) more from an anonymous than from an identifiable person. Anticipated guilt fully mediated these effects in all three studies. Taken together, our research suggests that anonymous victims may be more likely to incur unethical treatment, which could explain many unethical business behaviors. (shrink)

Drawing upon conservation of resources theory, we develop and test a theoretical model that specifies how and when employee humor toward leaders affects leader abusive supervision. We propose that employee humor is negatively associated with leader abusive supervision via leader relational energy. Furthermore, the negative indirect relationship between employee humor and leader abusive supervision via leader relational energy is stronger for female leaders than for male leaders. An experiment and a multi-wave, multi-source field study provide substantial support for our hypotheses. (...) Our findings contribute to the abusive supervision literature by identifying employee humor as a safe and effective bottom-up approach to prevent leader abusive supervision. (shrink)

The extant literature has largely conceptualized abusive supervision as a hot and impulsive form of aggression. In this paper, we offer a cold and strategic perspective on how abusive supervision might be used strategically to achieve goals. Drawing on the Machiavellian literature and social interaction theory of aggression, we develop a moderated serial mediation model, in which leader Machiavellianism predicts their strategic use of abusive supervision on subordinates via the mediating role of leaders’ guanxi with direct supervisor. We further theorize (...) that this mediation effect is more pronounced when guanxi among team members (team member guanxi, TMG) is stronger, because Mach leaders are more likely to perceive high TMG as a threat to their power. Finally, we propose that Mach leaders’ strategic use of abusive supervision has negative implications for team outcomes, manifested in low levels of team voice and team organizational citizenship behaviors toward fellow team members (OCBI). Analyses of two studies—Study 1 using multi-wave data (355 leaders) from a US sample and Study 2 using a multi-wave, multi-source, and multilevel data (1252 subordinates and 273 leaders) from a Chinese sample—corroborated our model. This study provides a comprehensive examination of who, how, and when strategic abuse unfolds in the workplace and its negative implication for team outcomes. (shrink)

Whereas previous research on ego depletion and ethics suggests that employees who are depleted of their self-control resources are more likely to engage in unethical behavior, our current research focuses on how observers perceive and react to depleted employees’ unethical behavior. Integrating ego depletion and attribution theories, we hypothesize and find that observers judge depleted employees’ unethical behavior more leniently than non-depleted employees as a result of lower levels of perceived intentionality. These perceptions in turn lead to lower levels of (...) punishment. Results further suggest that not all types of depletion lead to the same effects on observers’ lenient moral judgments—depletion due to externally imposed reasons are more likely to result in lenient moral judgment, compared to depletion due to internally imposed reasons. (shrink)