SHANXI UNIVERSITY OF FINANCE AND ECONOMICS

ASSIGNMENT: HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

SUBMITTED BY: MARYAM ALI KAZMI (穆蕊)

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 “How Ethical Leaders Help Offset the Negative Effect of Morality On
Creativity”

Research Background
Thus, organizations face a possible conundrum—on the one hand, organizations need employees
to think out of the box and demonstrate high creativity; on the other hand, organizations need
employees to stay in line and embody high morality. Especially given recent ethical crises and
the increasing corporate malfeasance, maintaining morality is particularly important as it helps
avoid regulatory peril and prevent from trillions of dollars losses (Schwepker, 2001; Treviño,
den Nieuwenboer, & Kish-Gephart, 2014). In this regard, only valuing creativity but ignoring
morality is a huge pitfall for organizations (Florida & Goodnight, 2005; Treviño, Weaver, &
Reynolds, 2006). Beyond enhancing creativity, it is also important for organizations to ensure
their employees act with high morality. Together, there are important research questions to
address. We further propose that a way to mitigate such negative relationship may lie in the
ethical leadership of the work unit’s supervisor. Ethical leadership is defined as “the
demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal
relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication,
reinforcement, and decision making” (Brown, Treviño, & Harrison, 2005, p. 120). Role theory
argues that in addition to conformity to one’s role, having one to share the role responsibility is a
possible strategy to resolve conflicting role expectations (Biddle, 1979, 1986; Katz & Kahn,
1978). In the workplace, the leader is a critical actor who can (and in many cases should) assume
responsibility (Biddle, 1979).
This is true particularly with regards to (un)ethical issues, as the leadership literature suggests
ethical leadership to be a central source of ethical guidance and regulation (Brown & Treviño,
2006; Treviño, Brown, & Hartman, 2003). Furthermore, in line with the key tenets of role
theory, we develop a new concept called moral responsibility relief, defined as a sense of relief
feelings because of reduced moral role responsibility, to explicitly capture the underlying process
and explain why ethical leadership mitigates the negative impact of moral ownership on
creativity.
Ethical leadership sets and enforces clear ethical rules and takes the moral responsibility to
manage unethical behaviors in the workplace. Such leaders serve to take over the moral agent
role responsibility and relieve employees higher on moral ownership from the burden of
monitoring and maintaining moral standards and regulating the ethicality of their environment.
Thus, employees higher on moral ownership who have ethical leaders will experience moral
responsibility relief and will not suffer from a decline in creativity associated with high morality.
The moral agent role imposed by moral ownership seems incongruent with the creativity role
given that morality emphasizes compliance and maintaining rules while creativity stresses
“breaking the rule.” As a result, the moral agent role would compete with the creativity.

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Namely, helping employees who take on responsibility for ethical issues to be creative. Studies
have found a direct effect of ethical leadership in improving employee positive attitudes such as
affective commitment and job satisfaction (Brown et al., 2005; Neubert, Carlson, Kacmar,
Roberts, & Chonko, 2009), increasing employee positive behaviors such as citizenship behavior
and job performance (Avey, Wernsing, & Palanski, 2012; Chen & Hou, 2016), and reducing
deviant and unethical behaviors (Mayer, Aquino, Greenbaum, & Kuenzi, 2012; Mayer, Kuenzi,
Greenbaum, Bardes, & Salvador, 2009). Our research indicates that ethical leadership may act as
an important boundary condition to counteract the potential downside of moral ownership on
creativity and may serve as a possible solution to resolve the possible morality— creativity
conundrum.

Research Innovation
Moral ownership refers to employees’ sense of responsibility over the ethical nature of their own
behaviors and of the external environment (Hannah & Avolio, 2010; Hannah et al., 2011). This
construct is derived from theory of moral agency that assumes that individuals have the capacity
to exercise control over the ethical nature of the context (Bandura, 1991, 1999), and relates to the
notion of psychological ownership. In the literature of psychological ownership, the targets can
be both tangible (e.g., product) and intangible (e.g., ethics; Pierce et al., 2003; Rousseau, 1998).
The targets of ownership are associated with one’s self-identity and are viewed as an extension
of the self (Dittmar, 1992). In this vein, individuals higher on ownership will internalize the
specific target to be part of their “selves” and regard it as an important role in their lives.
Accordingly, employees higher on moral ownership will incorporate morality into the sense of
self and act as moral agents in organizations (Hannah & Avolio, 2010; Hannah et al., 2011).
Such employees would feel a sense of high responsibility to regulate the ethicality of their own
behaviors and the environment. Although empirical research on moral ownership is scant,
scholars have argued that moral ownership is effective in facilitating employees’ ethical
behaviors and reducing employees’ unethical behaviors. For example, Hannah et al. (2011)
proposed that higher levels of moral ownership would be associated with higher levels of moral
motivation and moral action. Treviño et al. (2014) also stated that “The ascription of
responsibility to the self has long been considered important to ethical decision making” (p. 646)
and concluded with the relationship between moral ownership and unethical behavior.
We assert that the mechanism underlying the mitigating effect of ethical leadership on the
negative relationship between employee moral ownership and employee creativity can be
explicitly captured by moral responsibility relief, referring to a sense of relief feelings because of
reduced burden of moral role responsibility. A relief feeling occurs when a goal is successfully
achieved and a burden or a threat is avoided or removed (Carver, 2009). A feeling of relief also
signals those resources are restored and replenished after a specific goal is achieved
(Fredrickson, Mancuso, Branigan, & Tugade, 2000), and it further indicates that individuals can
consider other available goals to pursue (Fredrickson, 1998; Isen, 1987). Integrated with role

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theory, when one’s role responsibility is fulfilled and the burden is reduced, individuals tend to
experience the feeling of role responsibility relief. Subsequently, such relief can replenish
individuals’ resources and facilitate them to consider other role responsibilities such as
creativity.

Research Ideas
We designed two field studies and two experimental studies to jointly offer a rigorous test of our
hypotheses.2 In Study 1, we collected cross-sectional dyadic data from paired managers and
employees in the United States; in Study 2, we used a two-wave survey design of team-based
data from China; in Studies 3 and 4, we used a scenario-based experiment and a high-
engagement lab experiment, respectively, to increase the internal validity of our conclusions. In
the high-engagement lab experiment, we looked at both low ethical as well as unethical
leadership and compared them to high ethical leadership to get better clarity of the mitigating
effect of ethical leadership. We also gauged the mediating role of moral responsibility relief and
ruled out the potential influences of alternative predictors and mediators.

Research Contributions
This research aims to make several theoretical contributions. First, our research extends prior
work on morality and creativity by probing the effect of moral ownership on creativity. Extant
research has largely examined morality and creativity separately. Although a few studies have
started to unveil the common base of unethical behavior and creativity (e.g., Gino & Ariely,
2012; Gino & Wiltermuth, 2014; Keem et al., 2018; Zheng et al., 2019), we know little about
whether high level of morality as a disposition leads to lower creativity. We not only directly test
the effect of moral ownership on creativity, but also identify a mitigator (i.e., ethical leadership).
In other words, we not only identify a potential problem, but also provide a solution to the
problem and an explanation for why the solution works.
Second, this investigation serves to extend and substantiate role theory by formally examining
how perceived roles of moral responsibility can shift from employees to leaders. Katz and
Kahn’s (1978) theorization describes organizations as systems of interdependent behaviors,
whereby the behavior of one individual has an impact on the effectiveness of such individual,
their group and the organization (Griffin, Neal, & Parker, 2007).
We build upon and extend this argument by suggesting that roles taken by employees (and their
leader) can shift, and that such shift (i.e., a leader taking the role of monitoring morality thereby
relieving employees higher on moral ownership from such role requirement) can create benefits
for the whole organization. Third, our research contributes to the literature on ethical leadership
by exploring another potential benefit for such leadership, (Katz & Kahn, 1978; Welbourne,
Johnson, & Erez, 1998).
The core of role theory is that individuals subjectively internalize and take on certain role
responsibilities in each system, which will subsequently govern their behaviors as they choose

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from a variety of possible acts competing for their attention and energy (Biddle, 1979; Katz &
Kahn, 1978).
Employees pay less or even no attention to work behaviors that are not part of their role
conceptualization. If individuals are occupied with two incompatible role expectations, they are
likely to conform to only one role to resolve such incompatibility (Biddle, 1979, 1986; Katz &
Kahn, 1978).

Research Method
We recruited students at a large university on the East Coast of the United States to participate in
our study.5 Students received course credit in exchange for their participation. One week before
our lab study, participants were invited to complete an online presurvey asking them to rate their
moral ownership and provide demographic information including gender, age, and years of work
experience.6 We did that to be consistent with our theorizing about moral ownership as a
relatively stable individual difference and to distant this measurement from any manipulation in
the lab. In the actual lab study,
We used a two-factor between-subjects design to manipulate ethical leadership (high vs. low).
Participants were told that they had worked as part of a five-member team in the Marketing and
Communications department of the university for 3 years, and that their job duty was to enhance
the university’s reputation.
The scenario described their direct supervisor, René, who gave them an important task to
generate as many slogans as possible to advertise the university. Participants were then randomly
exposed to the high or low ethical leadership conditions and were given 10 minutes to generate
slogans. Finally, participants were asked to evaluate ethical leadership as a manipulation check.
In total, we received 131 responses for the presurvey and 130 responses for the lab study
survey.7 After matching the data using unique identification code for each participant, we had
120 valid responses (N 60 in the low ethical leadership condition, N 60 in the high ethical
leadership condition). Their average age was 22.05 years (SD 2.12), average work experience
was 3.83 years (SD 2.13), and 59% were male.

Research Content
Utilizing role theory, we investigate the potential negative relationship between employees’
moral ownership and their creativity, and the mitigating effect of ethical leadership in this
relationship. We argue that employees higher on moral ownership are likely to take more moral
role responsibility to ensure the ethical nature of their own actions and their environment,
inadvertently resulting in them being less able to think outside of the box and to be creative at
work. However, we propose that ethical leaders can relieve these employees from such moral
agent role, allowing them to be creative while staying moral. We adopt a multimethod approach
and test our predictions in 2 field studies (1 dyadic-based in the United States and 1 team-based

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from China) and 2 experimental studies (1 scenario-based and 1 team-based laboratory study).
The results across these studies showed: (a) employee moral ownership is negatively related to
employee creativity, and (b) ethical leadership moderates this relationship such that the negative
association is mitigated when ethical leadership is high rather than low. Moreover, the team-
based laboratory study demonstrated that moral responsibility relief mediated the buffering effect
of ethical leadership. We discuss implications for role theory, ethicality, creativity, and
leadership at work.