Ethical Leadership and Loyalty to Supervisor in China: The Roles of Interactional Justice and Collectivistic Orientation

This study examines the relation of ethical leadership with loyalty to supervisor, as well as mediating (interactional justice) and moderating (collectivistic orientation) variables of this relation by proposing a moderated mediation model. Specifically, we employed time-lagged research design to collect two waves of data from 395 supervisor-subordinate dyads in 74 teams, and used multilevel structural equation modeling to test the moderated mediation model. Results indicated that ethical leadership was positively related to loyalty to supervisor, interactional justice mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and loyalty to supervisor, and collectivistic orientation moderated the relationship between ethical leadership and interactional justice. Moreover, collectivistic orientation moderated the strength of the indirect effect of ethical leadership on loyalty to supervisor (through interactional justice), and the mediated relationship was stronger for high collectivistic subordinates than for low collectivistic subordinates. Theoretical and practical implications and future research directions were discussed.