Mediating role of affective commitment on effects of managers' leadership styles over unethical pro-organizational behavior

Large corporate scandals in recent years have led to an understanding and research of the existence of unethical but pro-organizational behaviors. Many researches in different scopes have been conducted on the subject in recent years. In this regard, the main purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of managers' leadership styles and employees' affective commitment on unethical pro-organizational behavior. In the theoretical part, leadership and leadership styles, ethics and morality relation, development of business ethics and causes of unethical behavior and factors affecting organizational commitment in terms of commitment on the large scale have been elaborated. In the research, the relationship between unethical pro-organizational behavior and executives' democratic, laissez-faire, autocratic leadership styles as well as the role of affective commitment in organization commitment have been studied. In this study, participants are randomly assigned sample from employees in companies operating in Turkey. As such, 424 individuals from retail, education, banking, health, manufacturing, logistics, information technologies, food, textile, service sector, aviation, energy, finance, construction, international trade, automotive, public, tourism, media and legal sectors completed a questionnaire. The data collected through survey method using three different scales. The scales used in the study are confirmed by factor analysis and then the relationship between variables are analysed with structural equation modelling. According to the findings obtained after factor analysis and structural equation modelling, 41% of the participants are prone to unethical pro-organizational behavior. A partial positive correlation has been observed between the democratic or laissez-faire leadership styles, affective commitment of employees and unethical pro-organizational behavior. A positive correlation between employees' affective commitment and unethical pro-organizational behavior has been found. There was no correlation observed between autocratic leadership styles and employees' unethical pro-organizational behavior.