Leaders Can Feel Licensed To Behave Badly When They Have Morally Upstanding Followers

By Emma Young Countless studies have investigated how a leader’s behaviour influences their followers. There’s been very little work, though, on the reverse: how followers might influence their leaders. Now a new paper, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, helps to plug that gap with an alarming finding: good, morally upstanding followers can create less ethical leaders. M. Ghufran Ahmad at the Lahore University of Management Sciences and colleagues ran a series of studies on participants in an executive training programme at a business school in Pakistan. All were senior or mid-level managers, from a variety of organisations. These, then, were the “leaders”. The people that they managed were the “followers”. In an initial study, the team found that the more a participant felt that their followers engaged in “organizational citizenship behaviour” (OCB) — such as going out of their way to be “good” to other employees — the more “moral credit” that leader felt they had personally accrued. The concept of moral credit relates to the theory that we each balance good and bad behaviours, to maintain a kind of moral equilibrium. A good deed ups our moral credit, while a bad one depletes that credit. While this phenomenon has been found for individuals, it’s thought to apply to groups, too: if one member behaves morally, others can feel licensed to behave less well. The team then ran follow...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: leadership Morality Occupational Source Type: blogs