John Schaubroeck

Unethical behavior in organizations has garnered considerable scholarly attention, with ethical leadership identified as a key factor in curbing misconduct. However, leaders are not the sole source of social influence—peers also play a profound role in shaping employees’ unethical conduct. While ethical leadership scholars have acknowledged that employees both “look up” to leaders and “look around” to peers for ethical guidance, how these influences, which may converge or diverge, interplay to affect employees’ unethical behavior is insufficiently understood. Drawing on substitutes for leadership and cue consistency theories, we develop competing hypotheses regarding the interaction between ethical leadership and observed peers’ unethical behavior in predicting individuals’ unethical behavior. Two multi-source studies provided converging evidence that perceiving workgroup coworkers engaging in higher levels of unethical behavior strengthened the negative effect of ethical leadership on individuals’ unethical behavior, supporting the hypothesis derived from substitutes for leadership theory. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

In the mentoring relationship, protégé proactivity is a key facilitator of mentoring support. However, we consider how protégé proactivity at work may lower mentors’ inclination to share knowledge. Drawing on and extending social perception theory and envy subtypes theory, we build a contingent dual-path model to theorize that a proactive protégé who takes charge at work may elicit mentor knowledge sharing or hiding through mentor benign or malicious envy, depending on the protégé's benevolence. Specifically, mentors are more likely to feel benign envy toward taking-charge and benevolent protégés, enhancing their knowledge sharing. Taking-charge protégés seen as less benevolent may encourage malicious envy in the mentors, leading them to hide knowledge. Findings from a multi-source, two-wave survey of the data of 187 mentor–protégé dyads in China (Study 1) and a pre-registered scenario-based experiment of 404 participants in the United States (Study 2) support our predictions. This research advances our knowledge of mentoring, envy, and proactivity, and provides practical implications to enhance the effectiveness of mentorship programs.

Drawing from the group engagement model of justice, we examine how and when higher abusive supervision relates to fewer safety behaviors and worse safety performance. In Study 1, a 2-wave survey study of 468 manufacturing technicians, we found that belongingness need satisfaction mediated the negative relationship between abusive supervision and safety behavior. In Study 2, a multiwave survey study of 589 airline pilots, we found that safety behavior mediated the adverse relationship between abusive supervision and downstream objective safety performance. Higher trait social standing uncertainty was associated with a stronger adverse relationship between abusive supervision and safety. Indirect relationships of abusive supervision with safety behavior (Study 1) and safety performance (Study 2) were stronger among individuals with higher social standing uncertainty. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for managing abusive supervision and safety at work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Members of teams are often prone to interpersonal communication patterns that can undermine the team’s capacity to engage in self-learning processes that are critical to team adaptation and performance improvement. We argue that team leader coaching behaviors are critical to ensuring that team discussions that may foster learning new teamwork skills and strategies are unfettered by the tendency of two or more members to exhibit contentious interpersonal communications. We accordingly test a model in which team contentious communication moderates the mediated relationship of team leader coaching behaviors on team innovation effectiveness and team task performance. In a study of 82 work teams, team leader coaching behaviors exhibited indirect, positive relationships with both team innovation effectiveness and team task performance through team learning, but only among teams with an average or higher level of contentious interpersonal communication. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for the leadership of teams.

We develop a model in which abusive supervision undermines individuals' perceptions of the level of respect they are accorded by their group peers, which in turn reduces their performance and disconnects them psychologically from the organization. High group potency strengthens each of these connections. We studied the theorized relationships across 3 periods during a 10-week residential organizational entry program. Group potency, representing shared group perceptions, moderated relationships at the individual level. These included the negative relationship between abusive supervision (Time 1) and perceived peer respect (Time 2) and the relationship between perceived peer respect and organizational commitment, organizational identification, and turnover intention (Time 3). We found stronger relationships between abusive supervision and perceived peer respect--and between peer respect and the attitudinal outcomes and turnover intention--among groups with higher potency. Perceived peer respect was also positively related to followers' task performance. We discuss implications of the conceptual framework and findings for future research and theory development concerning how groups and individuals respond to abusive supervision and to treatment by their peers.