Leadership in small teams often arises informally through social cues rather than formal roles, making emergent leadership a critical driver of how groups interpret and respond to ethical challenges. This study examines how a team member who models ethical or deviant behavior functions as an initial emergent leader and shapes how other teammates step into leadership roles. Using a 2 x 2 experimental design, teams of 2-5 undergraduate students (M = 3.75) discussed an ethical dilemma with a confederate as a team member who enacted either an ethical champion or deviant role under high or low moral intensity conditions. After accounting for team size, confederate role performance, and amount of confederate communication, the results showed that the confederate’s modeled behavior strongly influenced the leadership tendencies displayed by non-confederate teammates. Teams exposed to an ethical champion demonstrated higher ethical emergent leadership (p < .001) and lower deviant emergent leadership (p < .001), whereas teams with a deviant confederate showed the opposite pattern. Moral intensity did not affect ethical emergent leadership but reduced deviant emergent leadership (p = .047). Teams with ethical champions also demonstrated stronger formalistic orientations (p < .001), while deviant confederates increased teams’ utilitarian orientations (p < .001). These findings suggest that the first informal leader’s behavior guides the type of leadership that emerges from other team members and shifts the team’s ethical orientations when facing an ethical dilemma. Additionally, the perceived seriousness of the dilemma can act as a contextual factor that limits the spread of deviant leadership.

Authors:
Ellie Tran, The University of Texas at Arlington, United States
Logan Watts, The University of Texas at Arlington, United States
Michelle Martín-Raugh, The University of Texas at Arlington, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Ellie Tran is a PhD student in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at The University of Texas at Arlington and a graduate research assistant and lab manager in the PELICAN Lab.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Tuesday Schedule

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