Construing Leader Punishment of Unethical Followers

In this research we argue that the extent to which leaders will be likely to differentiate between integrity or competence causes of unethical follower behavior is dependent upon the leaders’ level of construal mindset. Specifically, we predict that leaders who are inclined to process information abstractly (i.e. are in a high level construal mindset) are more likely to be interested in the motivation underlying unethical follower behavior compared to leaders that are likely to process information relatively concretely (i.e. are in a low level construal mindset). Consequently, a high level construal mindset should make leader more likely to punish followers harshly after an integrity-rather than a competence-based violation. In two separate lab experiments we showed that leaders in a high level construal mindset indeed differentiate between different causal bases of violations; leaders in a low level construal mindset, by contrast, less so or do not make difference at all.