On the relation between felt trust and actual trust: Examining pathways to and implications of leader trust meta-accuracy.

Research has long emphasized that being trusted is a central concern for leaders (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002), but an interesting and important question left unexplored is whether leaders feel trusted by each employee, and whether their felt trust is accurate. Across 2 field studies, we examined the factors that shape the accuracy of leaders' felt trust-or, their trust meta-accuracy-and the implications of trust meta-accuracy for the degree of relationship conflict between leaders and their employees. By integrating research on trust and interpersonal perception, we developed and tested hypotheses based on 2 theoretical mechanisms-an external signaling mechanism and an internal presumed reciprocity mechanism-that theory suggests shape leaders' trust meta-accuracy. In contrast to the existing literature on felt trust, our results reveal that leader trust meta-accuracy is shaped by an internal mechanism and the presumed reciprocity of trust relationships. We further find that whether trust meta-accuracy is associated with positive relational outcomes for leaders depends upon the level of an employee's actual trust in the leader. Our research contributes to burgeoning interest in felt trust by elucidating the mechanisms underlying trust meta-accuracy and suggesting practical directions for leaders who seek to accurately understand how much their employees trust them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Leaders matter morally: The role of ethical leadership in shaping employee moral cognition and misconduct.

There has long been interest in how leaders influence the unethical behavior of those who they lead. However, research in this area has tended to focus on leaders' direct influence over subordinate behavior, such as through role modeling or eliciting positive social exchange. We extend this research by examining how ethical leaders affect how employees construe morally problematic decisions, ultimately influencing their behavior. Across four studies, diverse in methods (lab and field) and national context (the United States and China), we find that ethical leadership decreases employees' propensity to morally disengage, with ultimate effects on employees' unethical decisions and deviant behavior. Further, employee moral identity moderates this mediated effect. However, the form of this moderation is not consistent. In Studies 2 and 4, we find that ethical leaders have the largest positive influence over individuals with a weak moral identity (providing a "saving grace"), whereas in Study 3, we find that ethical leaders have the largest positive influence over individuals with a strong moral identity (catalyzing a "virtuous synergy"). We use these findings to speculate about when ethical leaders might function as a "saving grace" versus a "virtuous synergy." Together, our results suggest that employee misconduct stems from a complex interaction between employees, their leaders, and the context in which this relationship takes place, specifically via leaders' influence over employees' moral cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Making things happen through challenging goals: leader proactivity, trust, and business-unit performance.

Building on decades of research on the proactivity of individual performers, this study integrates research on goal setting and trust in leadership to examine manager proactivity and business unit sales performance in one of the largest sales organizations in the United States. Results of a moderated-mediation model suggest that proactive senior managers establish more challenging goals for their business units (N = 50), which in turn are associated with higher sales performance. We further found that employees' trust in the manager is a critical contingency variable that facilitates the relationship between challenging sales goals and subsequent sales performance. This research contributes to growing literatures on trust in leadership and proactivity by studying their joint effects at a district-unit level of analysis while identifying district managers' tendency to set challenging goals as a process variable that helps translate their proactivity into the collective performance of their units.

Development of a global measure of job embeddedness and integration into a traditional model of voluntary turnover.

Recent research on job embeddedness has found that both on- and off-the-job forces can act to bind people to their jobs. The present study extended this line of research by examining how job embeddedness may be integrated into a traditional model of voluntary turnover. This study also developed and tested a global, reflective measure of job embeddedness that overcomes important limitations and serves as a companion to the original composite measure. Results of this longitudinal study found that job embeddedness predicted voluntary turnover beyond job attitudes and core variables from traditional models of turnover. Results also found that job embeddedness interacted with job satisfaction to predict voluntary turnover, suggesting that the job embeddedness construct extends beyond the unfolding model of turnover (T. R. Mitchell & T. W. Lee, 2001) it originated from.