Niro Sivanathan

Using university residence staff as our leaders of interest, we explored the association of emotional intelligence and moral reasoning to leadership style and effectiveness. A total of 58 residence staff completed questionnaires assessing their emotional intelligence and moral reasoning. Subordinates (n=232) rated the residence staff’s leadership behaviours and effectiveness. Residence staff’s supervisors (n=12) also provided similar effectiveness ratings. Analysis showed that leaders who reported higher levels of emotional intelligence were perceived by their followers as higher in transformational leadership and more effective. Interestingly, having high emotional intelligence was not related to supervisor’s ratings of effectiveness. Supervisors associated greater job effectiveness with higher moral reasoning. Theoretical implications and practical applications of these findings are discussed.

Moral hazard involves a context where decision-makers engage in behaviors that prioritize self-interest while allowing the associated risk to be primarily borne by others. Such decision making can lead to catastrophic consequences, as seen in the 2008 global financial crisis after hedge fund managers indiscriminately invested their clients’ money in subprime mortgages. This research examines which decision-makers are most likely to engage in moral hazard decision making and the psychological mechanism driving this behavior. Drawing on the dual model of social influence, we posit that individuals associated with dominance, but not prestige, will engage in greater moral hazard behaviors. We further contend that these behaviors are driven by dominant decision-makers’ enhanced focus on end goals (outcomes) rather than the means (process) that they use to pursue such goals. We find support for our hypotheses across 13 studies (NObservations = 26,880; of which eight were preregistered and six studies are reported in the Supplemental Materials), using both correlational and experimental designs. Additionally, we vary the moral hazard context (e.g., a financial setting, a health and safety issue, etc.) and capture both behavioral intentions and actual behaviors, while also ruling out several alternative explanations. These findings demonstrate that dominant decision-makers engage in moral hazard behaviors because of their tendency to prioritize outcomes over processes.

Leaders play a pivotal role in establishing ethical norms and behaviors within organizations. Across seven studies (three in the Supplementary Information), we explore how subordinates infer their leader’s moral character outside the domain of ethical conduct and document this process’s downstream consequences. Specifically, we focus on the dual-strategies theory, which posits that leaders exert influence and obtain deference via two broad orientations of behaviors and cognitions: dominance and prestige. In a field setting of employees and their managers, we find that leader dominance orientation positively relates to subordinate self-reported unethical behavior, whereas leader prestige is negatively related to the same. In a second sample of working adults, we use a time-lagged study design to show that leader dominance (prestige) positively (negatively) relates to subordinate-reported unethical behavior at work partly because of a belief that the leaders engage in more (less) unethical behaviors, which contributes to a belief that norm-violating behaviors are more (less) acceptable within teams under dominance- (prestige-) oriented leaders. Finally, across four experimental studies, we observe that participants assigned to a dominance-oriented (versus prestige-oriented) leader perceived their leader as having lower moral character and expressed a greater likelihood of engaging in unethical behavior. We also document actual unethical behavior for monetary gain. This effect was mediated by the belief that unethical behavior was normative within the team. Our results highlight the importance of moral (mis)perception by demonstrating the consequences of a leader’s hierarchical orientation on subordinate ethical perceptions and behaviors at work.