The Effect of Leader-Member Exchange Quality on Unethical Behaviors: The Mediating Role of Followers' Moral Emotions

Abstract

This study examines the mediating influence of ethical emotions in the relationship between the leader-member exchange (LMX) and unethical behaviors. The survey of this study is conducted on 208 middle-level employees in Istanbul, Turkey. Our results reveals that the most frequent emotions that employees encounter are empathy, joy, pride and gratitude which shows us positive emotions are more common at workplace. Our results revealed that LMX has a negative significant effect on unethical behavior. By testing our hypothesis we found that empathy and joy mediate the relationship between LMX and unethical behaviors while pride and gratitude found to have no statistically significant effect on this relationship.