Introduction
The concept of unethical behavior and its potential for destruction seems to be perceptible and widely recognized; however, unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) is a relatively modern concept (Kong, 2016). UPB is a concept in which the desire to support the company outweighs unethical acts (Umphress et al., 2010). UPB is becoming more common in organisations and may cause significant long-term harm to organizational functionality. UPB has led to bankruptcies, business downfalls and near-collapse (e.g., Enron and Citibank), accounting frauds (e.g., Worldcom), product withdrawals (e.g., Toyota and Volkswagen), and litigation (e.g., Toyota and Volkswagen) (Inam et al., 2021).
According to social learning theory, defined by Cheng et al (2019) people develop good habits and norms through watching other corporate leaders. For personal safety and to protect the organization from future risks, leaders must often lie about the facts. Such manipulating or collective behaviors that encourage dishonest acts for temporary gains call into doubt a leader's responsibility and pose issues over dealing with them (Inam et al., 2021). Moreover, employees may create their behavioural styles in the workplace through observing and imitating leaders' actions (Bandura, 1986). Therefore, Leaders have been shown to affect their employees' unethical pro-organizational practices (Voegtlin et al., 2019).
Through the proper leadership, companies develop organizational standards of ethics, indicating which actions carried out on behalf of the organization are ethical and which are not. However, according to existing literature, the influence of leadership on UPB is ambiguous (Gigol, 2020). The existing literature on the relationship between leadership and UPB has only looked at owner/shareholder-centric leadership, such as ethical leadership (Kong, 2016) and transformational leadership (Kalshoven, van Dijk, & Boon, 2016). Even though more variation in behavioural, attitudinal, and emotional results may be explained by servant leadership than by transformational, ethical, or authentic leadership styles (Haq et al., 2021), prior studies have not investigated the influence of servant leadership on UPB, which raises the question: how effective servant leaders in dealing with employee behaviours that are simultaneously beneficial and harmful?
As a result, in addition to the scarcity of research on the impact of leadership on unethical pro-organizational behavior, this study aligns with (Gigol, 2020) who, in his recent study, recommended investigating the influence of servant leadership on UPB. In addition, within the context of servant leadership being the independent variable, the study will investigate the mediating role of trust in a leader and the moderating role of ethical climate based on the social exchange theory as recommended by (Haq et al., 2021). Hence, the proposed theoretical framework shown in (Figure 1) is based on social exchange theory. Leaders, employees, and other stakeholders can all be included in social exchange (Umphress et al., 2010).
According to social exchange theory, quality relationships evolve by sharing resources between two groups (Blau, 2017). A central theme of these societal perspectives is that they develop over time and accumulate as people benefit from their previous experiences, evaluate their existing reciprocal or nonreciprocal relationships exchanges, and make decisions on potential behavior (Wan et al., 2015), leading to the lowering of UPB among the employees. (Gigol, 2021).
In addition, the research would therefore provide significant findings by filling the gap concerning analysing the influence that servant leadership on UPB of the employees within the organization and how trust in leader and ethical climate of the organization impact the employees’ UPB, which help the future leaders to adopt the appropriate style of leadership to impact employee behavior.
The study is divided into six sections: the first is an introduction, the second is a literature review, the third is methods, the fourth is data analysis, the fifth is findings and discussion, and the sixth section is conclusions, research limitations, and future research.
Theory and hypotheses
Servant leadership and unethical pro-organizational behaviour
Servant leadership is a concept that has been used for a long time, where it was introduced four decades ago (Reed et al., 2011). Dierendonck, (2011) defined servant leadership as "an ideology of leadership based around the idea that the most powerful individuals are trying to help people instead of gaining authority or taking influence. Others may include customers, partners, colleagues, and the general community". Van Dierendonck & Nuijten (2011) identify eight dimensions of servant leadership viz (i.e., Empowerment, accountability, standing back, humility, authenticity, courage, forgiveness, and stewardship). Moreover, the behavior of employees within an organization is tightly linked to servant leadership, and it plays an essential part in preventing immoral behavior by their employees (Schuh, et al., 2021; Hosain, 2020).
In contrast, Umphress & Bingham (2011, p. 622) defined UPB as "actions that are intended to promote the effective functioning of the organization or its members and violate core societal values, mores, laws, or standards of proper conduct." Besides, the UPB concept has two significant aspects. The first is that UPB is unethical behavior for the, which is illegal or unethical (Jones, 1991); and the second is that UPB is a type of behavior that is both beneficial to the company and successfully adopted by workers (Zhang & Xiao, 2020; Lee et al., 2019).
As well, there is increasing evidence of employees engaging in unethical actions for the sake of their companies (e.g., damaging archives to save the organization's reputation; exaggerated statements to the media; and this kind of conduct have been pointed to as UPB) (Lee et al., 2019). Most of the time, it results from Employees' conduct to support their company while still breaching ethical standards and thereby damaging the rights of external stakeholders and the wider community are referred to as (Umphress et al., 2010).
Much recent studies have shown that leadership style significantly influences UPB (Kang-Hwa & Hung-Yi, 2018). Therefore, different leadership styles have varying effects on UPB through various impact mechanisms (Zhang & Xiao, 2020; Aboramadan, Dahleez, & Hamad, 2020). In terms of servant leadership, Wu et al. (2017) discovered an inverted U-shaped relationship between servant leaders and their employees' UPB, which indicates that servant leaders must apply the appropriate level of servant leadership traits to their followers. However, the overall finding indicates that when servant leadership is more robust, UPB will become weaker because servant leadership adds a moral dimension and a social responsibility component (Paesen et al., 2019; Haq et al., 2021).
In addition, morality is at the core of the servant leadership style founded on honesty and trust (Ghalavi & Nastiezaie, 2020). With their high moral and ethical standards, servant leaders tend to enhance subordinates' perceptions of distributive justice in the workplace (Schwepker, 2015). Similarly, through their strong legal and ethical values, servant leaders aim to improve subordinates' understanding of distributive fairness in the workplace (Gardner et al., 2010). Also, Servant leaders handle organizational problems by putting personal goals aside in favor of those of organizational stakeholders; and they see leadership as a way to serve people, organizations, and communities rather than as a way to gain personal influence and recognition (Greenleaf,1970).
Lastly, servant leadership emphasizes the spiritual, mental, and relational aspects of ethical leadership practices rather than the conventional "competency inputs" and " performance outputs" used to assess leader effectiveness (Bolden & Gosling, 2006). Thus, Prior literature shows a positive effect of servant leadership on many behavior factors (e.g., organizational citizenship behavior, trust in leaders and organizational trust, organizational-level and team-level performance, and organizational commitment) (Paesen et al., 2019; Ghalavi & Nastiezaie, 2020). Based on the prior literature, we anticipate that servant leadership is negatively related to UPB. Hence, we hypothesize:
H1. Servant leadership is negatively related to UPB.
Servant leadership and trust in a leader
In general, the concept of trust is influenced by antecedents such as leadership style (Haq et al., 2021). Mayer et al., (1995) define trust in a leader as "the willingness of a subordinate to be vulnerable to the behaviors and actions of the leader that are beyond the subordinate's control." therefore, leadership is intimately linked to the leader's ability to inspire trust (Bartram, 2007). Trust in any organization plays an integral part in the relationship between the leader and the employee and a strong relationship between trust in the employees' commitment and organizational citizenship (Fischer et al., 2020).
Consequently, employees are committed to their organization and have a sense of organizational commitment and citizenship when they trust their leader (Setyaningrum, Setiawan, & Irawanto,2020). A high leader's self-confidence gains the trust of his employees, leading to increase the subordinate's loyalty because they feel that their leader will do the job well and make good choices, promote and shape common values, and therefore the followers can agree with and respect their leader (Ayu et al., 2017). In addition, effective trust relates to the interpersonal bonds between a leader and a follower when they participate in a social interaction mechanism, and the characteristics of a leader, such as trustworthiness, affect the leader -followers’ trust positively (Haq et al., 2021). Sendjaya & Pekerti (2010) establish that servant leadership relates positively to trust in a leader. Therefore, the following hypothesis is posited:
H2. Servant leadership is positively related to trust in the leader.
Trust in leader and UPB
At its core, trust entails a "willingness to give a trustee considerable control on their working lives" and a "vulnerability against the other person" (Colquitt & Rodell, 2011, p. 1184). As A Result, a trust may lead employees toward UBP activities when trust is considered a cause of vulnerability or misuse of power. On the other hand, due to their trust and faith in their leaders, employees can use extra-role behavior to signal their loyalty to their organization (Haq et al., 2021). Accordingly, the concept of trust varies depending on the person, the relationship, and the passage of time (Zhou et al., 2017). Thus, trust can have a positive or a negative impact on UBP. We use the trust concept in the current study centered on a social exchange relationship and considered the product of social interaction between dyadic individuals.
In addition, (Schuh et al., 2021) argue that employee UPB was positively related to leader trust when leaders have a solid proclivity for moral disengagement. On the other hand, servant-leaders gain followers' trust by prioritizing their followers' best interests and trusting their workers to work in the organization's best interests (Achen et al., 2019). Also, servant leadership style from a social exchange perspective increases the organizational citizenship behavior through a close leader-member exchange relationship (Wong et al., 2020) and improves pleasant communication, emotional help, knowledge exchange, and active participation, leading to a solid leader-follower relationship (Yukl & Fu, 1999), we conclude that trust in a leader when mediating the relationship between servant leadership and UPB, trust in a leader will have a negative impact on UPB. Moreover, this conclusion aligns with (Khan, Mubarak, & Islam, 2020) finding. In addition, from the above discussion, servant leadership increases employee loyalty and organizational citizenship; Guo, Zhao, Cheng, & Luo (2020) confirm that a high level of employee loyalty and organizational citizenship leads to a lower UPB. As a result, we expect trust in a leader will lower the employees’ UBP, and therefore it is logical to predict:
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