A high level of justice perception not only promotes employees’ task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and creativity, but also reduces their potential organizational retaliation and deviance behavior. To enhance employees’ justice perceptions, first and foremost is ensuring that leaders adhere to justice rules. However, a frustrating reality is that leaders often fail to do so, even when they recognize the importance of justice rule adherence. Thus, in recent years scholars have increasingly focused on explaining the above phenomenon. Scholars adopting an “actor-centric” perspective have found that leaders’ low levels of justice-related traits and justice motives are among the key factors that lead them to violate justice rules. However, a growing number of studies reveal that leaders with both high levels of justice-related traits and justice motives will sometimes violate justice rules. Therefore, scholars have called for moving beyond the “actor-centric” perspective to a “situation- centric” perspective by investigating the role of contextual factors in affecting leaders’ justice behavior. Sherf et al. (2019) were among the first to do so by investigating how leaders’ work overload influences their justice rule adherence. However, there is little research on how political environment may influence leaders’ justice behavior. An organization is not only a workplace for assigning and completing tasks, but also a political site infused with political behavior. Understanding how and when an organization’s political environment may impact leaders’ justice rule adherence has important theoretical implications.
To fill the above gaps, in this paper we investigate how political environments affect leaders’ justice rule adherence. Based on the strength model of self-control, we argue that, at the within-person level, leaders’ perceptions of organizational politics (POP) will be positively related to their ego depletion, and their tenure will weaken this positive relationship between POP and ego depletion. Nevertheless, the relationship between leaders’ ego depletion and justice rule adherence (and thus the relationship between leaders’ POP and justice rule adherence via the mediation of ego depletion) depends on their leader identity.
To test our theory, we conducted a survey in a large commercial bank in an eastern province of China, using a time-lagged interval-based experience sampling method. Our final sample included 570 observations from 73 branch managers. We analyzed data using MSEM and found that, at the within-person level, leader POP was positively related to ego depletion, and the relationship was moderated by leader position tenure so that it was significant only under low position tenure. Additionally, leader identity moderated the relationship between ego depletion and justice rule adherence so that the relationship was positive under high leader identity and negative under low leader identity. Furthermore, POP had a positive indirect effect on justice rule adherence via ego depletion when tenure was low and leader identity was high, and the indirect effect was negative when both tenure and leader identity were low.
We make important theoretical contributions to the “situation-centric” perspective research on justice rule adherence, POP, and the strength model of self-control. First, instead of highlighting the task assignment environment before, we explore the consequence of leaders' embedded political environment on their justice rule adherence. At the same time, different from the previous discussion of the conscious cognitive mechanism, the unconscious self-control mechanism of ego depletion is taken as the mechanism to explain the influence of situational factors on justice rule adherence. Second, this paper is the first, to the best of our knowledge, to verify within-person changes of POP and link it to proactive justice research. Finally, we extend the boundary conditions for understanding how ego depletion affects leader behavior. In addition, this research offers crucial practical implications for how to shape the organizational political environment and direct it to increase leaders' justice behavior.
