From ethical leadership to dual-level OCB: A cross level model

Abstract

Leaders are really important to a team or an organization, because they play key roles for guiding the team members or employees' behavior. In this article we consider that ethical leadership influences organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) at different levels. Drawing on social identity theory (SIT) we argue “identification with team leader” as a mediator from ethical leadership to group-level OCB and individual-level OCB. Meanwhile we theorize and propose the bottom-up process linking individual-level OCB to group-level OCB through another mediator - Team Identification. We argue that individual-level OCB in a team is positively related to group-level OCB via team identification. In the end, we discuss implications and limitations of our arguments for theory and practices.