<p> The primary focus of this study was to learn how ethical leadership behaviors impacted employee organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and to propose a theory related to the relationship between ethical leader behaviors and employee OCB. This qualitative grounded theory study investigated specific types of leader behaviors and other, non-leader related factors that contributed to employee OCB. Seven female and 10 male engineers, working in a variety of engineering disciplines at various levels of leadership in their organizations, provided important perspective from their experience. The study discovered specific leader behaviors that can be traced back to ethical leadership theory encourage employee OCB. <i>Role model-employee relationship theory</i> or RMER was developed from analysis of the data. There are three constructs to RMER: <i>the ethical leader,</i> in which three distinct leadership behaviors of mentoring, supporting, and role modeling appear to promote employee OCB, <i>growing into leadership, </i> which describes the phenomena found in this study where employees who have role models early in their careers in turn choose to become role models once they become leaders, and <i>employee characteristics promote employee OCB,</i> in which employee characteristics of psychological ownership, self-esteem, and employee voice were each found to be important to promoting employee OCB, especially when combined with leader behaviors that promoted employee OCB.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:3603790 |
| Date | 21 January 2014 |
| Creators | Pitzer-Brandon, Danielle M. |
| Publisher | Capella University |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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