Leadership Research Summary:
- Feedback seeking relates positively to organizational identification and task performance. However, an individual generally views seeking feedback as risky. It remains unclear whether, why, and when ethical leadership impacts on feedback-seeking behavior. This research aimed to explore the mediating role of psychological safety in the relationship between ethical leadership and nurses’ feedback seeking and to further explore the moderating effect of power distance in this mechanism. After eliminating invalid surveys, the sample included 458 pairs. The SPSS PROCESS macro was used for the data analysis.
- The results indicate that ethical leadership positively affected nurses’ feedback-seeking. Ethical leadership influences feedback seeking through psychological safety. With high power distance, ethical leadership significantly positively influenced psychological safety and then positively affected feedback-seeking behavior. In sum, in the context of high-power distance, ethical leadership is especially important for psychological safety and feedback-seeking behavior.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- Considering the long-term high-power distance orientation in Chinese society, the role of ethical leadership in employee feedback-seeking behavior is particularly important. Leaders should promote the development of corporate ethics. Leaders should not only practice and set ethical examples but also emphasize the establishment of moral standards and a good ethical atmosphere in the management process. Ethical leadership creates two necessary conditions for employee feedback-seeking behavior: a sense of responsibility derived from gratitude and a sense of psychological safety derived from good interpersonal relationships. Kabanoff (1991) pointed out the dilemma of leadership research: on the one hand, leadership research must emphasize the hierarchy difference between managers and ordinary employees, and on the other hand, it must study how to promote identity and cooperation between leaders and subordinates.
- We believe that ethical leadership provides a certain way to solve this dilemma: that is, to give full play to the ethical appeal of leaders and use positions to make leaders become role models to inspire employees to learn and imitate, rather than just using position power as a means of management control. It is necessary for the long-term organizational innovation and development of enterprises. Leaders need to start with their own behavior, abide by the law, be disciplined, actively assume social responsibility, and reject hypocrisy. Organizations should also play a supervisory role, exposing and punishing hypocritical behaviors in a swift manner and correcting managers’ ethical misunderstandings through publicity and training. In his way, leaders will no longer pay attention to the short-term benefits of corporate hypocrisy and will recognize the long-term harm of such behaviors. Leaders need to judge the power distance to choose the appropriate management mode when they use social skills. In Chinese management context, the power distance is relatively large, so leaders should give full play to interpersonal and emotional skills to help the team build a good organizational atmosphere.