Abstract:

Why do leaders in the real world not respond to the ethical components of business situations? How do subordinates react to this kind of leadership style? This study focuses on amoral management to explore the above questions. Amoral management refers to a leader’s consistent failure to respond to issues that have ethical implications and demonstrate ethical requirements through communication, modeling, and reward and punishment to subordinates. Although this kind of leadership is the "majority" in management practice, previous research only focuses on moral leadership and immoral leadership, and relatively ignores to research on this moral "inaction" leadership style. This study proposes a research framework to explore the antecedents and the double-edged sword effects of amoral management.

Study 1 explores the antecedents and generation mechanism of amoral management based on situational strength theory and individual-situation interactionist perspective. This study posits that leaders' individual characteristics of bottom-line mentality and moral decoupling, and contextual characteristics of organization competitive atmosphere and market competition directly expedite amoral management; organization competitive atmosphere and market competition respectively moderate the relationships between bottom-line mentality, moral decoupling and amoral management.

Study 2 establishes an integrated model consisting of two double-edged sword models to explore the influence of amoral management based on social information processing theory. Firstly, this study explores the relationship between amoral management and subordinates' task performance under the context of leaders’ high-performance expectation. Specifically, this study posits that in the context of leaders’ high-performance expectation, amoral management may promote subordinates' work engagement and task performance through instrumental cognition of mental focus on performance; it may also hinder subordinates' work engagement and reduce their task performance through ethical cognition of ethical strain. Secondly, this study posits that within the context of high-performance expectation, amoral management might potentially facilitate subordinates’ expedient behavior through the mediating roles of mental focus on performance and ethical strain, though it may promote employee task performance.

Study 3 explores the double-edged effects of amoral management from the perspective of market competition. Firstly, the study proposes that in situation of team perceived high leader bottom-line mentality, amoral management has an indirect positive relationship with team's customer service performance via team shared bottom line obligation; it may also indirectly facilitate team-oriented customer unethical behavior through team shared bottom line obligation. Secondly, this study proposes that when team members perceive a high leader bottom-line mentality, amoral management may enhance team customer service performance through team shared bottom line obligation, it may also facilitate team-oriented customer unethical behavior through reduced team role ethicality, presenting another manifestation of the double-edged sword effect.

The theoretical contributions of this study are primarily as follows: Firstly, it fills the research gap of amoral management. While scholars have paid attention to amoral management for decades, empirical examinations of its antecedents and influences remain scarce. This study focusing on amoral management brings significant and innovative knowledge to the field of ethical-related leadership. Secondly, this study establishes a theoretical framework to explain the antecedents and generation mechanism of amoral management based on situational strength theory and the effects of amoral management from social information processing theory. On the one hand, this study identifies four important individual and contextual variables which are bottom-line mentality, moral decoupling, organization competitive atmosphere, and market competition and their interaction effects on amoral management to explain why managers are inclined to amoral management. On the other hand, this study explains how amoral management exerts its constructive and destructive effects on individual and team’s work performance through multiple instrumental-ethical cognition processes. Thirdly, this study delineates the situational conditions for amoral management to exert the influence from the perspectives of high-performance expectation and leader’s bottom-line mentality. It addresses the problem of ethical information ambiguity inherent in amoral management, illustrates that the moral "neutral" of amoral management has deferent effects depending on the context, which deepens our understanding of the complexity, diversity and comprehensiveness of the effects of amoral management. This study not only provides useful enlightenment for the theoretical exploration of amoral management, but also provides important practical guidance for the recruitment and training of enterprise managers.

Key words: amoral management, bottom-line mentality, moral decoupling, work performance, instrumental- ethical cognition framework