دورنمای تبادل اجتماعی درباره اینکه رهبری اخلاقی چگونه و چه زمانی رفتار شهروندی مشتری مدار را تقویت می کند A social exchange perspective on why and when ethical leadership foster customer-oriented citizenship behavior

1. Introduction In recent times, there has been an increasing emphasis on the importance of effective leadership in the hospitality industry due to its rapidly changing and highly competitive environment (Kim and Brymer, 2011). Of the various approaches to leadership, ethical leadership in particular, has been shown to be highly relevant because of the numerous ethical challenges (e.g., the need to strike a balance between doing well in terms of financial performance and doing good) faced in the hospitality industry (Kincaid et al., 2008). In this regard, ethical leaders provide rich benefits in that such leaders make fair and balanced decisions and treat people around them in an ethical manner (cf. Brown et al., 2005). In the general management literature, research indicates that when leaders demonstrate ethical leadership behaviors, employees experience increased job satisfaction (Neubert et al., 2009), display extra effort towards the organization (Babalola et al., 2017a; Mayer et al., 2009; Ogunfowora, 2014), and perform their job better (Piccolo et al., 2010). A meta-analytical review of these findings shows that, above and beyond related leadership approaches, ethical leadership is strongly linked with employee outcomes (see Ng and Feldman, 2015, for a review), providing strong empirical evidence for its relevance as a viable a form of leadership. Although much is known about the benefits of ethical leadership in traditional organizations, it is not until recently that scholars have begun to investigate its effectiveness in the hospitality context (Celik et al., 2015; Dhar, 2016; Kim and Brymer, 2011; Qin et al., 2014; Zoghbi-Manrique-de-Lara and Suárez-Acosta, 2014). With the exception of Qin et al. (2014) that explored the link between ethical leadership and customer-oriented behavior, what is quite notable about most of these studies is that they tend to overlook ethical leadership’s influence on people in the external organizational environment such as, customers. Even though they have generally provided insights into utility of ethical leaders in the hospitality context, a critical question for hospitality scholars remain: Are there actual benefits associated with ethical leadership in the hospitality context beyond outcomes associated with organizations’ internal aspects, especially on important behaviors needed for the long-term survival of the industry such as, service employees’ citizenship behaviors directed toward customers (i.e., customer-oriented citizenship behavior; CCB; Qin et al., 2014)? And more importantly, when and why are employees of ethical leaders more likely to engage in CCB? Addressing such questions is important because CCB not only affects customer satisfaction but also contributes to the success of service organizations (Tang and Tang, 2012). While we acknowledge research showing that ethical leaders can motivate customer-oriented behaviors by increasing job satisfaction and work engagement (Qin et al., 2014), we believe that it is crucial to further expand this line of inquiry for two reasons. First, prior work has yet to fully tap into the social exchange framework (Blau, 1964) in which citizenship behaviors are embedded, thus limiting the extent to which unique boundary conditions and mechanisms of the ethical leadership CCB link can be sufficiently captured. Second, citizenship behaviors are by nature not mandatory (Organ, 1988; Podsakoff et al., 2009) and their relations with leadership are generally more complex. Thus, understanding when and why employees would engage in CCB is crucial for advancing our theoretical insights about the complex link between ethical leadership and CCB and for helping practitioners improve CCB in the hospitality industry.