Ethical Leadership and Leaders’ Emotions: An Identity-Based Perspective on Moral Pride

Ethical leadership research has predominantly focused on its consequences for followers and organizations. Adopting an actor-centric, identity-based perspective, this research examines how ethical leadership behavior relates to leaders’ own emotional experiences through moral pride and how this process varies with core self-evaluation and burnout. Three studies using complementary methods tested the proposed relationships. Study 1 showed that unethical leadership behavior significantly reduced moral pride relative to the control and ethical conditions, whereas ethical behavior did not significantly increase moral pride relative to the control condition; CSE moderated the effect involving unethical behavior. Study 2 found significant indirect effects of ethical leadership behavior on positive and negative emotions through moral pride, with CSE moderating the relationship between ethical leadership behavior and moral pride. Study 3, using experience sampling, revealed exploratory conditional patterns across burnout levels: under relatively low burnout, the indirect relationship through moral pride was more evident for positive emotions, whereas under relatively high burnout, the negative indirect relationship with negative emotions was more pronounced. Together, these findings specify moral pride as a self-conscious emotional mechanism and highlight the relevance of individual and resource-related conditions in this process.