We are very pleased to announce the new publication by Maxim Egorov, Karianne Kalshoven, Armin Pircher Verdorfer and Claudia Peus in the Journal of Business Ethics on the effects of moral foundations congruence on ethical and unethical leadership perception.
While much research has focused on the effects of ethical and unethical leadership, little is known about how followers come to perceive their leaders as ethical or unethical. In this article, Egorov and colleagues investigate the co-creation of ethical and unethical leadership perceptions. Specifically, they draw from emerging research on moral congruence in organizational behaviour and empirically investigate the role of congruence in leaders’ and followers’ moral foundations in followers’ perceptions of ethical and unethical leadership. By analysing objective congruence scores from 67 leader–follower dyads by means of polynomial regression with surface response analysis, the authors find partial support for the theoretically derived predictions. Significant effects were revealed for the fairness, loyalty, and authority moral foundations but not for the care and sanctity moral foundations. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.