Interaction of rater and context in ethicality evaluation

We investigated how the evaluation of ethicality that precedes ethical decision making is influenced by personal and situational factors. We argued that both individual and contextual factors would simultaneously influence ethicality evaluation. We found that employees’ regulatory focus significantly influenced their evaluation of supervisors’ ethical leadership (N = 40 supervisors and 142 employees). We also found that contextual factors interacted with individual factors in the ethicality evaluation process. Results showed that a positive relationship between employees’ promotion focus and their evaluation of their supervisor’s ethical leadership was negatively moderated by the supervisor’s moral attentiveness. Theoretical and practical implications and limitations in the study are discussed.