A Certainty Perspective on Ethical Leadership: Meta-Analytic and Field Studies of Counteracting Mechanisms and a Boundary Condition for Employee Creativity

Organizations must simultaneously ensure “appropriateness” through adherence to rules and norms while promoting novelty through risk-taking. Ethical leadership, characterized by an emphasis on normatively appropriate conduct and the encouragement of ethical behavior through communication, reinforcement, and decision-making, is increasingly viewed as a way to navigate this tension and enhance creativity—the generation of novel and useful ideas. We modify this positive view by investigating two distinct but not mutually exclusive mechanisms underlying the effects of ethical leadership from a certainty perspective. Specifically, we propose that ethical leadership provides employees with relational certainty, which fosters psychological safety and thereby boosts creativity, and with normative certainty, which promotes conformity and hence constrains creativity. We also identify intolerance of uncertainty as a boundary condition for these countervailing explanations. Across three complementary studies, including a meta-analysis (Study 1) and two field studies with multi-source and multi-wave data (Study 2 and Study 3), the results largely supported our hypotheses. Our research contributes to the literature by introducing a certainty perspective that clarifies both the positive and negative relationships between ethical leadership and employee creativity, as well as by identifying a key boundary condition.