Prototypicality and Organizational Misbehavior in a Dutch Fire Service: An Explorative Study on the Connection between Ethical leadership, Prototypicality and Organizational Misbehavior

In this article, we examine the relationship between ethical leadership and organizational misbehavior in a Dutch fire service and the extent to which prototypicality mediates this relationship. It is found that ethical leadership of battalion chiefs is statistically negatively related to the occurrence of self-reported disobedience of 61 crew commanders. Being a group prototype or not seems to fully explain this effect, as we found a full mediation effect. In addition, we found no statistically significant connection between the three components of ethical leadership, role modeling, rewards and discipline, and communicating
about ethics and values, and the self-reported organizational misbehavior. Consequently, the question arises whether leaders who are viewed as “ethical” leaders simply have more influence on the unethical behavior of subordinates due to their leadership or that their norms and values just more closely fit to the
professional norms and values of subordinates.