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The Duty to Improve Oneself: How Duty Orientation Mediates the Relationship Between Ethical Leadership and Followers’ Feedback-Seeking and Feedback-Avoiding Behavior

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Abstract

We sought to expand on the concept of the moral self to include not just the duty to develop the moral self but the moral duty to develop the self in both moral and non-moral ways. To do this, we focused on how leaders can promote a climate in which individuals feel a sense of duty to develop themselves for the betterment of the team and organization. In our theoretical model, duty orientation plays a key role in determining whether followers will seek performance feedback to develop their work selves. We hypothesized that followers with ethical leaders would experience a greater sense of duty to improve themselves and would therefore be more likely to seek and less likely to avoid leader feedback. Drawing on social learning theory, we hypothesized that (a) duty orientation would mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and feedback-seeking/feedback-avoiding behavior, (b) expert power would moderate the relationship between ethical leadership and duty orientation such that duty orientation would be higher when followers perceived their leader to be both highly ethical and competent, and (c) expert power would moderate the indirect effect of ethical leadership on feedback-seeking/feedback-avoiding behavior through duty orientation. We tested our hypotheses using a sample of 249 followers across two waves of data collection. Results suggest that ethical leadership and leader competence interact to drive followers’ duty orientation, thereby reducing followers’ feedback-avoiding behaviors. Further, ethical leadership had a direct positive relationship with followers’ feedback-seeking behaviors.

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Notes

  1. We also performed all analyses excluding AL as a control variable. The results concerning the level of significance between constructs do not change. Results of these analyses are available from the authors upon request.

  2. Because of the high correlations among ethical leadership, authentic leadership, and leaders’ expert power, we conducted a test of heteroskedasticity when testing our hypotheses. Specifically, we used Glejserm test (1969), which is an effective test and could be performed in SPSS. The results suggested that there are no serious heteroskedasticity problems in our model and data. Full results are available from the authors upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA

    Sherry E. Moss, Sean T. Hannah & John J. Sumanth

  2. College of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China

    Meng Song

  3. Business School, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China

    Zhen Wang

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  1. Sherry E. Moss
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Correspondence to Meng Song.

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Conflict of interest

Sherry E. Moss declares that she has no conflict of interest. Meng Song received research Grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71802013) and The Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science Project (Grant No. 17YJC630125). Sean T. Hannah declares that he has no conflict of interest. Zhen Wang declares that he has no conflict of interest. John J. Sumanth declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 7, 8, 9, 10.

Table 7 Results of the mediating effects of duty orientation (without controlling for goal orientation)
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Table 8 Results of the moderated mediation effects (without controlling for goal orientation)
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Table 9 Results of the mediating effects of duty orientation (without controlling for learning goal orientation)
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Table 10 Results of the moderated mediation effects (without controlling for learning goal orientation)
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Moss, S.E., Song, M., Hannah, S.T. et al. The Duty to Improve Oneself: How Duty Orientation Mediates the Relationship Between Ethical Leadership and Followers’ Feedback-Seeking and Feedback-Avoiding Behavior. J Bus Ethics 165, 615–631 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-4095-8

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