Although empowering leadership is central to employees, leaders, and organizations, few studies have examined follower behavior and its role in incentivizing leaders to engage in empowering leadership. We use an exploratory, sequential mixed methods approach to explore comprehensively the influence of employee characteristics (i.e., work performance and ethical behavior) and leader-perceived threats on empowering leadership. We conducted two studies—the first entailed in-depth interviews of 24 managers from different industries to identify (i) the primary employee factors that determine empowering leadership and (...) (ii) the types of leader-perceived threats. The five employee factors and three leader-perceived threats identified lay the groundwork for the quantitative research in the second study. We used leader–member exchange theory and social dominance theory in analyzing data from 357 pairs of employee–supervisor questionnaires. The analysis confirmed the importance of employee ethical behavior (versus work performance) in predicting empowering leadership, and the crucial role of leader trust in connecting employee ethical behavior and work performance with empowering leadership. Leader-perceived power threats negatively influence empowering leadership and mitigate the positive impact of leader trust on empowering leadership. Thus, this study extends the literature’s perspective about empowering leadership to include ethical concerns and leader–member interaction. (shrink)

Corruption devours profits, people, and the planet. Ethical leaders promote ethical behaviors. We develop a first-stage moderated mediation theoretical model, explore the intricate relationships between ethical leadership and employee ethical behaviors, and treat ethical climate and organizational justice as dual mediators and leaders’ moral attentiveness as a moderator. We investigate leadership from two perspectives—leaders’ self-evaluation of moral attentiveness and members’ perceptions of ethical leadership. We theorize: These dual mediation mechanisms are more robust for high moral leaders than low moral leaders. (...) Our three-wave data collected from multiple sources, 236 members and 98 immediate supervisors in the Republic of Iraq, support our theory. Specifically, ethical leadership robustly impacts organizational justice’s intensity and magnitude, leading to high employee ethical behaviors when leaders’ moral attentiveness is high than low. However, ethical leadership only influences the ethical climate’s intensity but has no impact on the magnitude when leaders’ moral attentiveness is high than low. Therefore, organizational justice is a more robust mediator than the ethical climate in the omnibus context of leader moral attentiveness. Our findings support Western theory and constructs, demonstrating a new theory for Muslims in Arabic’s emerging markets. Individual decision-makers apply their values as a lens to frame their concerns in the immediate and omnibus contexts to maximize their expected utility and ultimate serenity-happiness. Ethical leadership trickles down to employee ethical behaviors, providing practical implications for improving the ethical environment, corporate social responsibility, leader-member exchange, business ethics, and economic potentials in the global competitive markets. (shrink)