Abstract
Silence, which is a dysfunctional behavior, works to resolve potential problems if used positively. It serves to restrain employees from bombarding management with information overload or indulging in conflicts. This study aims to enhance our understanding of the role of ethical leadership, regarding academically positive behaviors mediated by prosocial silence and organizational commitment. A total of 325 faculty members from higher education institutions in Pakistan participated in this study. The results show that ethical leadership is positively related to academically positive behaviors in the workplace. Furthermore, prosocial silence and organizational commitment were found to mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and academically positive behaviors. Additionally, employee engagement moderated the enhanced positive relationship between ethical leadership and academically positive behaviors mediated by prosocial silence and organizational commitment. Our study finds that silence can have two faces referred to as Yin (negative) and Yang (positive). The Yang of silence (i.e., prosocial silence) works well under ethical leadership and promises positive organizational outcomes. The current study also finds that employees hide their concerns in support when they trust their leaders' ability to nurture a moral culture. Thus, this study extends the literature on the Yang of silence (i.e., prosocial silence) using a moderated mediation model to understand ethical leadership in improving academically positive behaviors in an Asian context. Furthermore, the theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.
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Data Availability
The data that supports the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Notes
The "secure attachment" is one of the three attachment styles defined by Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall (1978).
The maximum representation from youth is encouraging as these are early career aspirants and are the ones who are struggling to establish themselves. They often face situations that require them to remain silent and focus on their work.
When measuring Cronbach’s alpha in SPSS, we removed two items (morality-fairness_item6 and power-sharing_item4) based on the low-inter item correlation. The Cronbach’s alpha improved from .79 to .82.
The original scale of teachers' task performance was modified for better clarity of the construct using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The EFA results, therefore, reveal that Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) was 0.89 and the Bartlett's Test of Sphericity was 817.67, p < 0.0001, suggesting that the construct under study is reliable. Furthermore, after performing the extraction, the communalities showed that the items have a loading above 0.30, suggesting the construct sustained good validity. Besides, the total variance explained for factor 1 was 48.60%.
The UWES-9 has acceptable psychometric properties as compared to the UWES original 17 item scale (Schaufeli et al., 2006). They also advocated the use of UWES-9 in positive organizational scholarships.
Except for two items of PS (i.e., PS1, r = .33; PS3, r = .28) and three items of OC (i.e., OC1, r = .46; OC3, r = .49; OC8, r = .43) were removed because the factor loading of these five items were below the minimum threshold of 0.5.
PROCESS version 3.5, by Andrew F. Hayes (http://www.afhayes.com).
The model fits for the three individual mediating models are a) ethical leadership (EL)–prosocial silence (PS)–academically positive behaviors (APB): GFI = 0.97, CFI = 0.97, RMSEA = 0.07, b) ethical leadership (EL)–organizational commitment (OC)–academically positive behaviors (APB): GFI = 0.96, CFI = 0.97, RMSEA = 0.08, and c) prosocial silence (PS)–organizational commitment (OC)–academically positive behaviors (APB): GFI = 0.99, CFI = 0.99, RMSEA = 0.08. For the statistical significance of the differences between the above competing mediating models, the chi-square difference test yielded a reliable result: (a) between PS–OC–APB and EL–PS–APB (△χ2 (14) = 35.80, p < .0001) and (b) between PS–OC–APB and EL–OC–APB (△χ2 (14) = 47.89, p < .0001), the differences were significant. Overall, the results showed that the groups involved were statistically different from one another.
The trust construct was developed by adopting two items from the ethical leadership scale to determine the relationship between trust and prosocial silence. The items were as follows: a) My departmental head (immediate boss) deserves trust, can be believed and relied upon to keep his/her word, and b) My departmental head (immediate boss) can be trusted to serve the interests of his/her subordinates rather than him/herself. Hence, the relationship between trust and prosocial silence proved to be reliable (β = .23, SE = 0.04, p < .0001).
Although the negative aspect of silence was out of scope for this study, we further investigated CFA for the measure of silence by Van Dyne et al. (2003) to see it has one factor (i.e., silence) or two factors (i.e., positive/negative aspects) with the sample of Pakistanis. The results revealed that the two-factor model (χ2 (19) = 65.63, GFI = 0.95, CFI = 0.88, RMSEA = 0.09) performed significantly better (△χ2 (1) = 82.79, p < .0001) than the one-factor model (χ2 (20) = 148.42, GFI = 0.90, CFI = 0.68, RMSEA = 0.14). This suggests that silence has two different dimensions among Pakistanis.
Captain Sullenberger landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River (on January 15, 2009) after a flock of birds hit the engine at an altitude of 2,818 ft. After a few seconds, the plane began to glide due to engine failure. The captain had tried to approach a nearby airport but soon realized that they could land in the river. The crew members and passengers "embraced [sic] for the impact," following the captain's lead. Captain Sully (an ethical leader) knew what was best at the moment, and his command provided psychological safety to the crew members and passengers. They all knew that their leader had done what could be done at that moment to ensure everyone's safety. The result was startling: The captain himself evacuated everyone and ensured their survival. The captain instilled psychological safety among the fellow members and passengers through steady decisions and safe planning. The 155 people were thankful for him and displayed prosocial silence regarding the leader's action.
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Acknowledgements
We greatly acknowledge the fellowship support from Global Korea Scholarship Program 2019, which helped us carry out this research. A part of this work was presented as a poster at the APS 2020 Virtual Poster Showcase. Also, this work is part of Ph.D. dissertation of the first author at the COMSATS University Islamabad, Pakistan.
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Imam, A., Kim, DY. Ethical leadership and improved work behaviors: A moderated mediation model using prosocial silence and organizational commitment as mediators and employee engagement as moderator. Curr Psychol 42, 10519–10532 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02631-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02631-5