Unethical pro-leader behavior (UPLB) reflects how followers may violate ethical norms to serve their leaders, constituting a microlevel expression of ethical fading in organizations. While UPLB has begun to attract scholarly interest, its antecedents remain underexplored. Existing studies largely adopt a social exchange perspective, assuming that UPLB stems from reciprocal motives. Draws upon social information processing theory and cognitive dissonance theory, the purpose of this study examines that leaders’ unethical pro-organizational behavior (LUPOB) acts as a contextual signal that fosters moral decoupling in subordinates, which in turn increases their likelihood of engaging in UPLB. Furthermore, the authors propose that trust in leader strengthens this indirect relationship by increasing the perceived credibility and evaluative weight of LUPOB.
Using a time-lagged survey and a recall-based experimental study, the proposed model was tested using ordinary least squares regression with the PROCESS 3.5.
The findings demonstrate that LUPOB positively influences UPLB via moral decoupling. Trust in leader not only moderates the direct effect of LUPOB on moral decoupling but also strengthens the indirect effect of LUPOB on UPLB through moral decoupling.
This study advances the understanding of UPLB by identifying LUPOB as a novel contextual antecedent, highlighting moral decoupling as a cognitive mechanism underlying follower misconduct and revealing trust in leader as a critical boundary condition that shapes how followers interpret and respond to unethical leader behavior.
