The moral dark side of entrepreneurial leadership: How it leads to employee creative unethicality

Sijia Zhao, Lingfeng Yi and Ya Xi Shen

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, 2025, vol. 34, issue 4, 1328-1340

Abstract: Drawing on the social cognitive theory of morality, we propose a moderated mediation model to explain why and how employees under the supervision of entrepreneurial leadership engage in unethical behaviors to achieve creative performance. Specifically, we anticipated that entrepreneurial leadership would cause employees to engage in moral justification, which in turn would lead to creative unethicality. Furthermore, we argue that politics perception serves as a critical boundary condition, strengthening the indirect effect of entrepreneurial leadership on creative unethicality. We conducted two multiwave and multisource surveys and constructed a structural equation model to test the proposed hypotheses. Study 1, which involved 201 coworker–employee dyads in a single company, provided full support for all hypotheses. Study 2, conducted in 12 companies with 400 employees and 69 supervisors, replicated the findings of Study 1 and further confirmed the moderated mediation model. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12713

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:buseth:v:34:y:2025:i:4:p:1328-1340

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().