On the relation between felt trust and actual trust: Examining pathways to and implications of leader trust meta-accuracy.

Research has long emphasized that being trusted is a central concern for leaders (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002), but an interesting and important question left unexplored is whether leaders feel trusted by each employee, and whether their felt trust is accurate. Across 2 field studies, we examined the factors that shape the accuracy of leaders' felt trust-or, their trust meta-accuracy-and the implications of trust meta-accuracy for the degree of relationship conflict between leaders and their employees. By integrating research on trust and interpersonal perception, we developed and tested hypotheses based on 2 theoretical mechanisms-an external signaling mechanism and an internal presumed reciprocity mechanism-that theory suggests shape leaders' trust meta-accuracy.

Leaders matter morally: The role of ethical leadership in shaping employee moral cognition and misconduct.

There has long been interest in how leaders influence the unethical behavior of those who they lead. However, research in this area has tended to focus on leaders' direct influence over subordinate behavior, such as through role modeling or eliciting positive social exchange. We extend this research by examining how ethical leaders affect how employees construe morally problematic decisions, ultimately influencing their behavior.

Making things happen through challenging goals: leader proactivity, trust, and business-unit performance.

Building on decades of research on the proactivity of individual performers, this study integrates research on goal setting and trust in leadership to examine manager proactivity and business unit sales performance in one of the largest sales organizations in the United States. Results of a moderated-mediation model suggest that proactive senior managers establish more challenging goals for their business units (N = 50), which in turn are associated with higher sales performance. We further found that employees' trust in the manager is a critical contingency variable that facilitates the relationship between challenging sales goals and subsequent sales performance.

Development of a global measure of job embeddedness and integration into a traditional model of voluntary turnover.

Recent research on job embeddedness has found that both on- and off-the-job forces can act to bind people to their jobs. The present study extended this line of research by examining how job embeddedness may be integrated into a traditional model of voluntary turnover. This study also developed and tested a global, reflective measure of job embeddedness that overcomes important limitations and serves as a companion to the original composite measure.