Supervisors’ ethical leadership and graduate students’ attitudes toward academic misconduct

Abstract

Graduate students’ academic misconduct has received increasing attention. Although past literature has emphasized university faculty as an important influencing factor on students’ moral behaviors, the mechanisms must be further disclosed. We investigated how supervisors’ ethical leadership influenced graduate students’ attitudes toward academic misconduct. We explained why and how supervisor gender affects post-graduate students’ social learning process by integrating social cognitive theory and role congruity theory. Study 1 used a sample of 301 graduate students in 60 academic teams in four Chinese business schools. Study 2 used experimental vignette methodology to enhance the findings’ internal and external validity and provided evidence of causality. Based on the two complementary studies, we found that supervisors’ ethical leadership significantly inhibited students’ acceptance of academic misconduct through students’ moral efficacy and the ethical climate of the academic team. The indirect effect via moral efficacy was more significant s for female supervisors. Implications for ethical leadership, academic misconduct, gender differences in leadership, and moral education were discussed.