{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.018518518518518517, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0044444444444444444, 'mean_word_length': 5.721393034825871, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Ethical leadership begets ethical leadership: exploring situational moderators of the trickle-down effect

The current study investigated the role that perceived ethicality of one’s leader, as well as perceptions of organizational climate and justice, have in shaping one’s own ethical leadership. We expected positive perceptions of organizational climate and justice to increase the trickle-down effect of ethical leadership from higher to lower levels. We used ratings of ethical leadership from 286 followers nested within 167 leaders, who provided ratings of their own leader’s ethical leadership as well as their perception of the ethical climate and organizational justice of their organization. Contrary to expectations, multi-level modeling showed that negative perceptions of organizational climate and justice increased the trickle-down effect of ethical leadership. The discussion focuses on the possibility that the counter-intuitive finding may be due to differences in situational strength between higher and lower level leaders (i.e., less consensus at lower levels leads to unclear norms around ethics and justice and greater reliance of leadership for guidance). Further research on situational strength may better delineate when individual versus organizational variables are more influential in moderating the trickle-down effect.