Leadership Charisma

The detrimental effects of unethical behavior have been documented extensively and include detrimental effects on individual wellbeing, future careers, and organization survival. In general, it is believed among organizational researchers and managers that unethical behavior is excessively destructive or entirely driven by self-interest. Nevertheless, scholars have discovered that employees may perform unethical behavior for the interest of their company, such as lying to clients or hiding information from the public. To understand these unique phenomena, Umphress et al. proposed the construct of unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB), which refers to activities conducted to potentially enhance the operation of the company, leaders, or members, yet breaches critical social values and damages the interests of external stakeholders. Given the prevalence and negative consequences of this behavior, it is significant to understand when and why employees engage in UPB. Researchers have conducted studies on the antecedents of UPB based on social identity theory, social exchange theory, and social learning theory. These researchers argued that UPB is significantly associated with leadership style, individual differences, personality, and values, as well as job characteristics. Among these factors, leadership plays a crucial role in employees' UPB. For instance, Graham et al. argued that leaders' style and frames are significant factors in employees' UPB. Therefore, researchers have explored why various leadership styles play different roles in UPB. Notably, recent empirical findings implicating charismatic leadership suggest that unethical behavior may be invoked by leadership styles, which creates more risks and uncertainty in work environments. Indeed, despite charismatic leadership being capable of producing strong positive effects on followers' behavior in companies, it can also lead to adverse consequences. Charismatic leadership is regarded as a dominant style of leadership in enterprises as a result of its signal values-based, symbolic, and emotion-laden style. Charismatic leadership is known to cope with cognitive and emotional challenges to produce positive outcomes in the workplace. Fragouli (2018) proposed that the bright side of charismatic leadership can be eclipsed by its dark side, which causes detriment to the company. Charismatic leaders are likely to build an egalitarian, non-exploitative, and altruistic organizational culture. Nevertheless, the behavior of charismatic leaders can increase the risk levels of the organization by introducing instability and uncertainty into decision-making processes. Charismatic leaders inspire followers to take risks and motivate followers to achieve high corporate objectives. As a result of being manipulated by charismatic leaders, staff members can be driven to perform an organizational mission or breach the ethical bottom line.

As such, this study concentrated on how charismatic leadership relates to UPB. Unfortunately, previous research related to the correlation between particular leadership and UPB has yielded conflicting outcomes and failed to clarify how charismatic leadership may lead to UPB in the workplace. As argued by Dang et al., a pressing issue in research is to determine how leadership facilitates UPB. Moreover, this research will further contribute to theoretical knowledge by exploring the underlying psychological process of UPB, rather than exploring one single antecedent factor of UPB. While social identification, social learning, and social exchange theory have been applied to account for the relationship between specific leadership and UPB, prior studies have failed to adequately explain why psychological safety is considered a form of interplay between leadership and unethical behavior. Therefore, drawing on social information processing, we provide a new perspective on UPB by examining the effect of charismatic leadership on motivating UPB through employees' psychological safety. After controlling a set of control variables that would affect the variables of interest and their relationship, this study answers the call to examine a comprehensive model linking charismatic leadership to unethical behavior. Besides, we suggest that performance pressure can be a crucial factor in calibrating followers' reactions toward leader influences. Specifically, the more performance pressure, the more a charismatic leadership will stimulate followers' psychological safety, which will be positively associated with UPB; in contrast, the less performance pressure, the less a charismatic leadership will stimulate followers' psychological safety, which will be positively associated with UPB. A model of hypothesized relationships is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Theoretical Model.

By applying social information processing to the context of UPB, we try to examine the mediated link between charismatic leadership and employee cognition and behaviors, aiming to make at least four notable contributions. First, we contribute to the UPB literature by identifying more antecedent factors of UPB. Through exploring the dark side of charismatic leadership, our research offers an alternative perspective on the antecedents of UPB. We suggest that employees are motivated to engage in UPB when they perceive that it is safe to take risks. Understanding charismatic leadership related to specific unethical behaviors provides precious insights into the cognitive processes underlying the motivation of ambivalent behaviors that have both unethical and good-intention elements.

Second, this research helps unpack the intricacies of UPB. Psychological safety explains the link between charismatic leadership and followers' UPB, which complements the social information processing perspective. We invoke psychological safety as one reason why charismatic leadership may lead to followers' UPB. Previous theory has limitations in predicting why and when employees may engage in unethical behaviors that benefit the company under the supervision of a charismatic leader; thus, we use theoretical perspectives on social information processes to advance understandings of the triggers of UPB.

Third, we develop hypotheses implicating performance pressure as an essential characteristic that can strengthen or attenuate the effects of charismatic leadership on UPB. Our results contribute to understanding the UPB phenomenon by exploring the roles of performance pressure in a field study. Collectively, this work provides significant evidence to suggest that followers engage in UPB as a function of the psychological safety conveyed by charismatic leaders, which is more likely to be felt among followers with high performance pressure.

Finally, our focus on the harmful effects of charismatic leadership on UPB provides a new perspective on charismatic leadership literature. To date, scholars have exclusively examined charismatic leadership effects on followers' positive behavior, yet have not investigated how charismatic leadership may influence subordinate UPB. We thus answered the call from Bratton by highlighting that great leadership does not always lead to good outcomes. Therefore, this study aimed to rely on social information process theory to advance theoretical knowledge by exploring the underlying mechanism linking charismatic leadership to UPB.