The relationship between ethical leadership and employees’ internal and external community citizenship behaviors. The mediating role of prosocial motivation
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-01-2019-0019 |
| Date | 08 November 2019 |
| Pages | 636-652 |
| Published date | 08 November 2019 |
| Author | Nathan Eva,Alexander Newman,Abby Jingzi Zhou,Steven Shijin Zhou |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Global HRM |
The relationship between ethical
leadership and employees’
internal and external community
citizenship behaviors
The mediating role of prosocial motivation
Nathan Eva
Department of Management, Monash University, Clayton, Australia
Alexander Newman
Deakin University, Geelong, Australia, and
Abby Jingzi Zhou and Steven Shijin Zhou
University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo, China
Abstract
Purpose –Community citizenship behaviors (CCBs) of employees help organizations to promote a socially
conscious image. However, there is still a significant gap in the knowledge as to how to foster CCBs amongst
employees. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether ethical leadership, as a prosocial leadership
approach, fosters CCBs amongst employees, both at work and when they leave the office, through enhancing
their prosocial motivation.
Design/methodology/approach –Data were collected from 160 employees across 48 small- and
medium-sized enterprises in China. Multi-level modeling using maximum likelihood estimation in MPlus was
utilized to analyze the two-level model simultaneously and the significance of the multi-level indirect effects
was tested using the Monte Carlo method with 20,000 replications.
Findings –Counter to the expectations, the authors found that although ethical leadership increased
employees’prosocial motivation, this only translated to higher levels of employees’CCBs at work, but not
once they left the office.
Practical implications –The findings suggest that ethical leaders play a critical role in developing the
prosocial motivation of employees and encouraging them to engage in CCBs that are supported by the
organization. To that end, organizations should consider hiring leaders with high levels of ethical leadership
and provide ethical leadership training to senior management.
Originality/value –The authors make a theoretical contribution by explaining the process by which ethical
leaders influence employees to engage in CCBs, addressing calls to understand how social learning theory can
be used to understand how people learn to become socially responsible.
Keywords Quantitative, Corporate social responsibility, Leadership, Ethical leadership,
Prosocial motivation, Community citizenship behaviours
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Over the last decade growing empirical work has examined the factors which may drive
employees’community citizenship behaviors (CCBs) such as volunteering, participation in
organizational sponsored corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs and charitable
workplace giving (Basil et al., 2011; Grant, 2012; Gatignon-Turnau and Mignonac, 2015;
Haski-Leventhal, 2013; Rodell, 2013). However, the literature has predominately examined
the role of individual-level factors such as demographic characteristics and personality
traits in leading employees to engage in CCBs, rather than the role of important
organizational factors inherent in the work context such as leadership (Rodell et al., 2016;
Zhu, et al., 2014). For example, a recent systematic review of the literature on employee
volunteering by Rodell et al. (2016) highlights a lack of research on the role of leadership in
Personnel Review
Vol. 49 No. 2, 2020
pp. 636-652
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/PR-01-2019-0019
Received 14 January 2019
Revised 5 July 2019
Accepted 4 August 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm
636
PR
49,2
promoting employees’engagement in CCBs, and the mechanisms which explain the process
by which this may occur. In order to address these gaps in our understanding, we propose
that ethical leadership, a leadership approach predicated on raising the moral and ethical
mindset of employees (Brown and Treviño, 2006), acts as a key antecedent of employees’
engagement in CCBs both inside and outside the workplace.
CCB, also referred to in the literature as civic citizenship behavior (Van Dyne et al., 1994),
captures an individual’s positive behaviors directed toward the wider groups in the
community rather than the organization and organizational members. In the present study,
we differentiate between two types of CCBs; those that are undertaken as a result of
organizational membership, i.e. involvement in CSR activities supported by the organization
(internal CCBs), and those that are undertaken voluntarily by the employee outside the
organization (external CCBs). Internal CCBs on the part of employees may include
participation in corporate volunteering schemes, corporate charitable giving schemes and
other CSR programs (Basil et al., 2011; Haski-Leventhal, 2013; Lin and Liu, 2017; Rodell et al.,
2016). External CCBs on the part of employees may include volunteering in the local
community, making charitable donations from one’s personal funds and helping out
strangers (Luria et al., 2015).
Within this study, we draw on social learning theory (Bandura, 1977), to explain how
ethical leadership influences employees’prosocial motives to increase employee engagement
in CCBs. Ethical leadership has been of great interest to researchers who have examined
why some employees engage in prosocial behaviors and others do not (Bonner et al., 2016;
DeConinck, 2015; Fehr et al., 2015). We argue that employees observe, internalize and
emulate ethical behaviors they learn from their ethical leaders. Further, the conversations
that leaders have with employees, what they choose to reward and punish, and focus
employees’attention to has a profound influence over the development of an employee’s
ethical mindset (Issa and Pick, 2010b; Jennings et al., 2015; Miao et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2016).
Thus, we contend that ethical leaders foster high levels of prosocial motivation amongst
employees that transcends the walls of the organization, and in turn leads employees to
engage in citizenship behaviors both inside and outside the organization.
In examining how ethical leaders may influence employees’internal and external CCBs,
our study makes two important contributions. First, we make an empirical contribution by
examining whether ethical leadership leads employees to engage in CCBs that are
undertaken as a result of organizational membership (internal), and those undertaken
voluntarily outside the organization (external). Second, through examining the mediating
role of employees’prosocial motivation on the relationship between ethical leadership and
CCBs, we make a theoretical contribution by explaining the process by which ethical leaders
influence employees to engage in citizenship behaviors which benefit those outside the
organization. In doing so, we address the calls of Gond et al. (2017) for more work to draw on
social learning theory to better understand how individuals learn to become socially
responsible.
2. Literature review
2.1 Ethical leadership
In the development of the ethical leadership framework, Brown and Treviño (Brown et al.,
2005; Brown and Treviño, 2006; Trevion et al., 2003) proposed that ethical leadership is
comprised of four components. First, by engaging in behaviors which are normatively
appropriate in the eyes of subordinates such as exercising responsibility and showing
respect to others, ethical leaders are viewed by subordinates as legitimate and credible role
models (Brown and Treviño, 2014). Second, ethical leaders engage in two-way
communication with their subordinates about ethical issues. They not only talk to
subordinates about ethics and stress the importance to them of acting in an ethical manner,
637
Community
citizenship
behaviors
To continue reading
Request your trial