Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Doctor of Business Administration

Major

Business Administration

Date of Defense

7-16-2024

Graduate Advisor

Francesca Ferrari

Committee

John Meriac

Stephanie Merritt

Matthew Taylor

Abstract

Research has examined follower perceptions of ethical leadership, but rarely accounts for the (mis)alignment between a follower’s sense of ethics and morality and that of a leader. This research examined the effects of a leader’s expression of each of the five Moral Foundations dimensions on ethical leadership perceptions, moderated by the respondent’s preferences for each of these foundations. To address this question, a policy capturing design was used to manipulate leaders’ high and low levels of each of the five foundations. The results of multilevel analyses indicate that at least for some dimensions of Moral Foundations, a follower’s evaluation of ethical leadership will be higher when their own emphasis on a dimension expressed by that leader is higher. We found no significant difference in evaluations of ethical leadership for followers with low v. high levels of moral identity, and interestingly found that female leaders were generally perceived as more caring than male leaders. This study offers an initial experimental look at the interaction between a follower’s and leader’s moral baseline and perceptions of ethical leadership; it opens the door for a rich collection of future research.

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