Despite urgent calls for more research on the integration of business ethics and the meaning of work, to date, there have been few corresponding efforts, and we know surprisingly little about this relationship. In this study, we address this issue by examining when and for whom ethical leadership is more effective in promoting a sense of work meaningfulness among employees, and their subsequent work attitudes. Drawing on the contingency theories of leadership and work meaningfulness literature, we speculate that both employees’ (...) core self-evaluation and perceived organizational support moderate the relationship, but in different ways, and these associations carry over to employees’ subsequent work attitudes in terms of job satisfaction, organizational commitment and turnover intention. We test our hypotheses with two-wave survey data collected from 377 employees. Results indicate that ethical leadership is effective in eliciting work meaningfulness and attitudes for employees higher in CSE or when POS is lower, and ineffective for those lower in CSE or when POS is higher. A supplementary analysis reveals a three-way interaction between ethical leadership, CSE and POS in predicting a sense of work meaningfulness and subsequent work attitudes. Our research cautions that ethical leadership is not a universally positive practice; it can be ineffective or even have a negative impact under some circumstances. (shrink)

Recent literature suggests that ethical leadership helps to inhibit followers’ unethical behavior, largely built on the premise that followers view ethical leaders as ethical role models and socially learn from them, thereby engaging in more ethical conduct. This premise, however, has not been adequately tested, leaving insufficient understanding concerning the conditions under which this social learning process occurs. In this study, we revisit this premise, theorizing that not all followers will equally regard the same ethical leader as being a personal (...) ethical role model, thereby bounding the leader’s effects in reducing followers’ unethical behavior. We integrate the role of follower self-concepts into social learning theory, hypothesizing that the extent followers emulate their ethical leaders is contingent on how they identify with ethics as well as the particular leader. We test our hypotheses with three-wave survey data collected from 214 employees, finding that ethical leaders are viewed as being role models only amongst followers higher in moral identity and leader identification, and that followers’ perceptions that the leader is an ethical role model mediated the effect of ethical leadership on followers’ unethical behavior. Interestingly, results for the full-model tests show that ethical leadership evokes unethical behavior amongst followers lower in both moral identity and leader identification. These results suggest that ethical leadership is not a universally useful practice to decrease unethical behavior and that a more nuanced understanding of its contingent effects needs to be better understood. (shrink)

How to mitigate stock price crash risk has become a focus in the theoretical and practical fields. Building on the work of Kim et al., this paper investigates the relation between corporate philanthropy and crash risk under the unique Chinese institutional background. The results show that both state ownership and the 2005 split share reform attenuate the mitigating effect of corporate philanthropy on crash risk. Specifically, the negative relation between corporate philanthropy and crash risk is less pronounced for state-owned enterprises (...) than for non-state-owned enterprises, and it is also less pronounced after firms accomplish the split share reform. Further, this effect is more pronounced for firms with greater financial risks and poorer performance. Our paper contributes to the growing literature on the determinants of stock price crash risk and the economic consequences of corporate philanthropy. It also offers useful guidance to firms that are seeking to reduce stock price crash risk in emerging markets. (shrink)

Although the trickle-down effect of ethical leadership has been documented in the literature, its underlying mechanism still remains largely unclear. To address this gap, we develop a cross-level dual-process model to explain how the effect occurs. Drawing on social learning theory, we hypothesize that the ethical leadership of high-level managers could cascade to middle-level supervisors via its impact on middle-level supervisors’ two ethical expectations. Using a sample of 69 middle-level supervisors and 381 subordinates across 69 sub-branches from a large banking (...) firm in China, we found that middle-level supervisors’ ethical efficacy expectation and unethical behavior–punishment expectation accounted for the trickle-down effect. The explanatory role of middle-level supervisors’ ethical behavior–reward expectation, however, was not supported. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Business Ethics: A European Review, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 172-187, April 2021.

Human vision supports social perception by efficiently detecting agents and extracting rich information about their actions, goals, and intentions. Here, we explore the cognitive architecture of perceived animacy by constructing Bayesian models that integrate domain‐specific hypotheses of social agency with domain‐general cognitive constraints on sensory, memory, and attentional processing. Our model posits that perceived animacy combines a bottom–up, feature‐based, parallel search for goal‐directed movements with a top–down selection process for intent inference. The interaction of these architecturally distinct processes makes perceived (...) animacy fast, flexible, and yet cognitively efficient. In the context of chasing, in which a predator (the “wolf”) pursues a prey (the “sheep”), our model addresses the computational challenge of identifying target agents among varying numbers of distractor objects, despite a quadratic increase in the number of possible interactions as more objects appear in a scene. By comparing modeling results with human psychophysics in several studies, we show that the effectiveness and efficiency of human perceived animacy can be explained by a Bayesian ideal observer model with realistic cognitive constraints. These results provide an understanding of perceived animacy at the algorithmic level—how it is achieved by cognitive mechanisms such as attention and working memory, and how it can be integrated with higher‐level reasoning about social agency. (shrink)

In this article, we offer a critical realist conception of curriculum that aims to cultivate critical thinking (CT) and liberate students from egocentric rationality. We first examine egocentric rationality as a problem emerging from the technicist paradigm of cultivating CT in higher education, exemplified by issues arising from the pedagogical activity of debate. We then examine existing approaches to cultivating CT, focusing on the extent to which their goals and conceptions of CT could liberate students from egocentric rationality. Drawing on (...) Roy Bhaskar’s stratified conception of being and principle of immanent critique, we offer a critical realist conception of curriculum, explaining its definition of CT as the capacity for self-critique. We shall illustrate, in the context of an undergraduate debate course, how such capacity can be developed in order to liberate students from egocentric rationality. Curriculum is thus a critical praxis, a created space where student’s CT develops in a way that is intrinsically entwined with their being and becoming. This article extends the philosophical basis for integrating CT with curriculum and offers pedagogical implications. (shrink)

Intelligent personal assistants own anthropomorphic features which enable users’ perception of anthropomorphism. Adopting the perspective of mind-based anthropomorphism, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how mind-based anthropomorphism influences users’ exploratory usage of IPAs. Based on the notion that anthropomorphism can satisfy people’s sociality and effectance motivation, we hypothesize that mind-based anthropomorphism can enhance people’s social connection with IPAs and IPA self-efficacy, which can in turn influence their exploratory usage of IPAs. Questionnaires were developed and distributed to users who (...) had experience in smart speaker-based IPAs on Wenjuanxing and 551 valid questionnaires were collected to test the research model. The results revealed that cognitive and affective anthropomorphism exerted common and differential impacts on IPA self-efficacy and social connection. Cognitive anthropomorphism versus affective anthropomorphism had stronger influences on IPA self-efficacy, while affective anthropomorphism had stronger impacts on social connection. Both IPA self-efficacy and social connection enhanced users’ intentions to explore IPAs. This study enriches previous studies on IPA adoption or post-adoption by investigating exploratory usage which captures how users are deeply engaged with IPAs. (shrink)

The direction and specificity of endolysosomal membrane trafficking is tightly regulated by various cytosolic and membrane‐bound factors, including soluble NSF attachment protein receptors (SNAREs), Rab GTPases, and phosphoinositides. Another trafficking regulatory factor is juxta‐organellar Ca2+, which is hypothesized to be released from the lumen of endolysosomes and to be present at higher concentrations near fusion/fission sites. The recent identification and characterization of several Ca2+ channel proteins from endolysosomal membranes has provided a unique opportunity to examine the roles of Ca2+ and (...) Ca2+ channels in the membrane trafficking of endolysosomes. SNAREs, Rab GTPases, and phosphoinositides have been reported to regulate plasma membrane ion channels, thereby suggesting that these trafficking regulators may also modulate endolysosomal dynamics by controlling Ca2+ flux across endolysosomal membranes. In this paper, we discuss the roles of phosphoinositides, Ca2+, and potential interactions between endolysosomal Ca2+ channels and phosphoinositides in endolysosomal dynamics. (shrink)

Tree branches near the electric power transmission lines are of great threat to the electricity supply. Nowadays, the tasks of clearing threatening tree branches are still mostly operated by hand and simple tools. Traditional structures of the multirotor aerial robot have the problem of fixed structure and limited performance, which affects the stability and efficiency of pruning operation. In this article, in order to obtain better environmental adaptability, an active deformable trees-pruning aerial robot is presented. The deformation of the aerial (...) robot is implemented through two ways, arm telescopic and folding. In order to suppress the influence of internal and external disturbances on the system, Active Disturbance Rejection Control technology is adopted to build the flight controller. Firstly, active deformation aerial robot structure is given, followed by system dynamic model establishment under wind disturbance using the Newton–Euler method. Also, the analysis of the gusts influence on the system is considered. Then, the active deformation aerial robot system is decoupled into a combination of six SISO systems, so that a disturbance rejection controller is designed. Finally, the expanded state observer and the nonlinear state error feedback law are used to inspect and compensate the disturbance. Simulation results of attitude and position tracking as well as the antidisturbance capability show that the active deformation aerial robot with the ADRC flight controller designed in this paper has excellent attitude control capabilities during flight and trees-pruning operation. (shrink)

Transparency of textbook activities, i.e., the degree of easiness for teachers to process and comprehend them, needs to be researched in terms of both materials design and materials use. This article reports on a study that investigates the impact of teachers’ professional experience and transparency of textbook activities on teachers’ actual perception of the transparency of materials. The study adopted a mixed-methods design and collected quantitative data via a five-point scale survey from 115 secondary school teachers as well as interview (...) data from 15 informants. Data analysis reveals that both teachers’ professional experience and transparency of textbook activities affect the degree of easiness teachers perceived as they understand and interpret the activities for pedagogical purposes. However, discrepancy exists between transparency in materials design and transparency in teachers’ perception. Lack of pedagogical knowledge about the relationship between teaching objectives, steps, and assessment and strong existing cognitive schemata developed from the stereotype of processing a familar set of teaching materials might hamper teachers’ perception of transparency. (shrink)