Channeling Employees’ Positive Moral Emotions in CEO Activism: The Role of Care-Oriented Leadership Communication

ABSTRACT

CEO activism has the potential to inspire employees’ activism and engender a broad societal impact. Yet, few studies have provided empirical evidence exploring the impact of CEO activism on employees’ cognition, emotion, and behavior. Drawing on multidisciplinary insights from moral psychology theories, signaling theory, social learning theory, and build-and-broaden theory of positive emotions, we theorize a conceptual framework that delineates how CEOs’ communication stressing the moral value of ethics of care triggers employees’ other-directed positive moral emotions of gratitude, admiration, and elevation, which in term enhance employees’ perceived organizational virtuousness and their advocacy behavioral intentions in accord with the CEOs’ stances. The framework was supported by an online survey with 575 full-time U.S. employees. Our study sheds light on how CEOs can unleash the power of their activism in promoting a moral climate within their organization and producing a collective impact among their followers to enhance societal well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• CEO activism
• employee advocacy
• ethics of care
• organizational virtuousness
• positive moral emotions

Disclosure statement

The author(s) whose names are listed below certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest, or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

Notes

1. Note that care-oriented leadership communication should also be distinguished from those other leadership communication strategies because ethics of care does not serve as the one and only moral compass guiding leaders with transformational, authentic, servant, ethical, or caring styles (Gabriel, 2015). In other words, those other leadership communication strategies may also reveal additional ethical orientations from the leader beyond care. For example, ethical leaders also value and communicate about fairness and compliance with normative standards (Lemoine et al., 2019). Authentic leaders communicate about justice and the importance of self-awareness and moral self-concordance (Lemoine et al., 2019; Olsen & Espevik, 2017). Servant leadership communication reflects leaders’ humility and their focus on benefiting multiple stakeholders, in addition to caring (Lemoine et al., 2019; Sousa & Van Dierendonck, 2017). Transformational leadership communication manifests the ethics of profession (i.e., emphasizing professional knowledge and experience as an ethical compass), apart from the ethics of care (Berkovich & Eyal, 2021). Caring leadership communication, in one of its alternative conceptualizations, adopts Heidegger’s philosophy of care that stresses leaders’ intervention in the affairs of others and has “little to do with compassion, kindness or niceness” that signify the ethics of care (Tomkins & Simpson, 2015, p. 1013).

2. We employed principal axis factoring with a Promax rotation, which revealed a single-factor solution with all factor loadings ranging from .75 to .90. The measurement items explained 72.42% of the total variance.

3. EFA results again revealed a single-factor solution. The item loadings ranged from .85 to .88. The measurement items explained 75.60% of the total variance.