Leadership Charisma

In this study, SIP was applied to investigate when and why employees perform unethical behavior for the interests of their company. Departing from prior research examining the heroic aspects of charismatic leadership, we explored why and when charismatic leadership leads to adverse outcomes, such as UPB. Our predictions revealed that charismatic leadership might provide psychological safety to subordinates and lead to UPB. We also explored the possibility that some followers with intense performance pressure may have a higher likelihood of engaging with UPB.

Theoretical Implications

This research has several necessary implications for leadership and ethical literature. First, we have underscored the role of charismatic leadership in boosting unethical behavior for the benefits of the organization. Psychological safety was proposed as one of the fundamental mechanisms connecting charismatic leadership and UPB. Our findings confirmed the theory that charismatic leadership enhances psychological safety, which results in the stamina required for UPB. It is significant to understand that charismatic leadership does not necessarily lead to positive outcomes. Charisma is not a God-given characteristic and may be used for wrong and tragic ends. In particular, charismatic leadership can enhance the psychological safety of followers and inspire them to achieve organizational goals by taking risks, such as conducting unethical behavior for the benefit of the organization. As such, charismatic leadership is not necessarily good and does not necessarily lead to positive outcomes.

Second, our study has revealed the critical preconditions of the relationship between charismatic leadership and UPB through psychological safety, with our outcomes demonstrating that a substantial performance pressure amplifies this positive relationship. A psychologically safe environment is supposed to enhance employees' wellbeing. Previous research has suggested that psychological safety facilitates positive appraisals of work and life and plays a decisive role in wellbeing. This finding suggests that leaders' charisma mainly exerts influence on unethical behavior for the benefits of the organization when followers experience high performance pressure and do not fear taking risks, which is accounted for by the fact that, in this circumstance, followers are motivated by their leader's charismatic capabilities to endeavor to achieve organizational goals.

Third, we considered why a relationship might exist between charismatic leadership and UPB through SIP. Prior research has typically been reliant on fundamental tenets from social learning theory or social exchange theory to examine the antecedents of UPB. While admitting that these theories may explain the increase of UPB, we held the view that the effects of charismatic leadership on UPB will be more significant and enduring when psychological safety is formed through interpreting information from leaders and the environment.

Practical Implications

Our findings have several implications for organizations and practitioners. UPB is undertaken with good intentions, yet it is detrimental in the workplace. Our findings provide evidence that performance pressure can reinforce the relationship between charismatic leadership and UPB through psychological safety. Therefore, decision-makers requiring employees to achieve high performance should be aware of this dilemma and the management of employee UPB. Perhaps it is impractical to alleviate performance as organizations seek to maintain competitive advantage; however, managers can carefully consider how to uphold performance requirements while emphasizing the importance of ethical values. For instance, performance anticipation should be fulfilled with moral standards as the bottom line for how performance is achieved. Moreover, the infrastructure that staff members navigate in their performance must be linked to the company's moral practices. Leaders act as a crucial driver of employee ethical behavior and can adapt activities to promote ethical values and information to followers and reduce employees' UPB.

Limitations and Future Directions

Despite the research contributions, this research also involved some limitations. First, we assessed all our hypotheses with self-reporting measures and raised concerns about common method bias. Future research can be conducted on how to reduce common method bias by adopting experimental, longitudinal, or quasi-experimental designs and including data from other sources, such as the assessments of UPB by leaders or coworkers. Second, charismatic leadership has two dimensions; we measured global charismatic leadership in this study. Future studies could focus on the effects of the two types of charismatic leadership on UPB to improve the research design and offer a more comprehensive understanding of charismatic leadership functions.

Despite these limitations, our research provides the basis for further study. The results suggest charismatic leadership as a means through which organizations can increase psychological safety in taking risks, thus reinforcing employees' UPB. Researchers could consider other clues that may influence staff members' motivation to participate in UPB. For instance, researchers have found that particular emotions may motivate unethical behavior. It would be useful for researchers to consider the effect of charismatic leadership from various perspectives. While our research focused on charismatic leadership from the perspective of individuals, it may be informative to evaluate charismatic leadership at the team level. A further study exploring the diverse nature of charismatic leadership may help account for how companies mitigate the harmful effects of charismatic leadership for enterprises.

We collected the data from a single industry and a single cultural context. The study was collected in China and may limit the generalizability of our findings. Previous studies have demonstrated that, traditionally, the Chinese have a strong spirit of sacrifice for the sake of collective interests. The Chinese may treat UPB as a more appropriate way to repay their supervisors in response to charismatic leadership. Thus, the relationship between charismatic leaders and UPB may be stronger in Chinese firms than in Western companies. Therefore, we suggest that future studies verify the relationship between charismatic leadership and UPB in non-Chinese culture. Although our findings might probably be repeated in other industries, given the similarity of sale and service jobs in different industries, we cannot completely ensure the generalizability of our results to other industries. Future research may investigate more industries to ascertain the generalizability of our findings.

Finally, though our findings shed light on the role of charismatic leadership, the broader role of leadership and organizational culture remains unclear. Further research is needed to focus on the effects of other types of leadership in the organization on UPB. This might contribute to a more comprehensive knowledge about the functioning of leadership. Similarly, it may be worthwhile to consider additional mediating mechanisms that may transfer the effects of leadership on UPB. Our results showed that social information processing translated charismatic leadership's effects into UPB. We did not consider the joint effects of leadership and moral judgments on UPB, and future research should consider how these relationships and moral cognition jointly contribute to the motivation to engage in UPB. Although we relied on theory to present directional hypotheses, field study is not ideal for establishing causal direction. Future research should use a combination of experimental research and repeated-measures longitudinal designs to establish the robustness of the effects.