Why and When Helping Behavior Can Enable Followers to Cope with Leader Moral Scrutiny

We developed and tested a two-stage moderated mediation model to explore why and when helping behavior serves as a successful impression management tactic for coping with leader moral scrutiny. We revealed that followers’ helping behavior can serve as a successful tactic for coping with leader moral scrutiny because it can be used to manipulate the assignment of moral credit through the lens of impression management. We further hypothesized that performance subjectivity influences followers’ motivation to engage in impression management and impression management attribution affects the effectiveness of impression management. A study of 188 followers and 41 leaders supported this model. We found that helping behavior can enable followers to cope with leader moral scrutiny because it can result in moral credit for followers, especially in high-level performance subjectivity and low-level leader impression management attribution.