Fair Treatment and Belonging May Explain How Ethical Leadership Relates to Cadre Initiative

A new cross-sectional survey of 476 such administrators in Shanxi Province, China, reports that the leadership style most strongly associated with this self-started, change-oriented behavior is ethical leadership, and that its influence appears to travel through two distinct psychological channels: the perception that the organization is fair, and the feeling of being personally identified with the institution. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, is among the first to measure responsible initiative directly in the administrative stratum that Chinese universities rely on to turn strategy into daily operations. Responsible initiative sits within the broader family of proactive work behaviors, close to constructs that organizational psychologists call personal initiative and taking charge.

It describes an extra-role act: an employee notices an organizational problem, works out an improvement, and persists with it despite uncertainty, even when the task falls outside formal duties. In Chinese administrative discourse this profile corresponds to dan dang zuo wei, taking responsibility and delivering on it, an expectation attached to cadre roles at every level. Because middle-level cadres translate institutional strategy into school- and department-level routines while absorbing demands from above and representing staff below, researchers have long flagged them as decisive for whether reform agendas actually reach practice.

Yet the leadership conditions associated with their proactive conduct have remained largely unmeasured. The study's author, Lei Chen of San Niu College at Shanxi Technology and Business University, drew on two complementary theories to specify how ethical leadership might reach this outcome. Social exchange theory holds that followers who receive considerate, fair, and principled treatment perceive an obligation to reciprocate beyond their job descriptions, a generalized exchange obligation that has classically been described as the engine of extra-role behavior.

The resource followers most visibly receive from an ethical leader is fair treatment itself: equitable allocation of outcomes, transparent procedures, and dignified interpersonal handling, which is precisely the content of the distributive, procedural, and interactional justice dimensions measured in organizational justice research. Social identity theory offers a second account. People derive part of their self-concept from group membership, and organizations are among the most consequential groups in working adults' lives.

If fair and respectful treatment signals that the institution values its members, justice judgments should feed into organizational identification, the perceived oneness with and belonging to the organization, and identification should in turn carry cooperative engagement forward. Bringing the two theories together also addresses a tension each leaves open alone. Social exchange theory explains why fair treatment is reciprocated with discretionary effort, but it is silent on why such treatment should also bind employees to the organization itself; social identity theory explains the binding, but not the resource that sets it in motion.

The study therefore proposed a sequential pathway in which fairness is the evidence on which exchange obligations rest, and identification is the bond that carries those obligations into self-invested behavior. A parallel specification treating the two routes as independent cannot detect this conversion, because it leaves their ordering untested. The author accordingly tested a serial mediation model in which ethical leadership is associated with perceived fairness, perceived fairness is associated with identification, and identification is associated with responsible initiative.

Between October 2024 and January 2025, questionnaires were distributed to 520 middle-level cadres at 11 universities and colleges in Shanxi Province, chosen to cover the province's three main higher-education sectors: public universities, private institutions, and vocational colleges. After quality screening for missing data, straight-line answering, and completion time, 476 valid cases remained, 91.5 percent of returned questionnaires. Respondents ranged in age from 29 to 56, with a mean of 42.5 years, and 64.3 percent were male.

Average tenure in administrative positions was 11.8 years. Within each institution, participants were recruited through convenience sampling rather than random selection, a limitation the author acknowledges. All participants provided written informed consent, and the protocol was approved by the ethics committee of Shanxi Technology and Business University.

The instruments were established scales adapted to the cadre setting. Ethical leadership was measured with the 10-item Ethical Leadership Scale, in which respondents rated their direct superior on behaviors such as listening to team members and discussing business ethics or values. Organizational fairness was captured with 12 items adapted from Colquitt's organizational justice measure, sampling distributive, procedural, and interactional dimensions, with items such as rewards reflecting invested effort and procedures applied consistently across people.

Organizational identification used the six-item scale of Mael and Ashforth, including the item about a colleague's criticism of the institution feeling like a personal insult. Responsible initiative was measured with eight items adapted from personal initiative and taking-charge instruments, reworded to capture the organization-directed, responsibility-taking content of dan dang zuo wei. All items used five-point agreement scales, and internal consistency was high, with Cronbach's alpha values between 0.87 and 0.93.

The statistical machinery was a serial mediation analysis using PROCESS model 6 with 5,000 bias-corrected bootstrap resamples, a technique that estimates indirect effects by repeatedly resampling the data and checking whether the resulting confidence intervals exclude zero. The total effect of ethical leadership on responsible initiative was 0.389, statistically significant at p < 0.001. The indirect effect through organizational fairness was 0.107, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.059 to 0.162.

The indirect effect through organizational identification was 0.086, with a confidence interval of 0.053 to 0.127. The serial indirect effect through fairness followed by identification was 0.057, with a confidence interval of 0.037 to 0.086. Together, the three pathways accounted for 64.2 percent of the total effect, leaving a significant direct association as well, which suggests that ethical leadership likely also operates through channels the study did not measure, such as felt trust or psychological safety.

Several checks strengthened confidence in the pattern. A confirmatory factor analysis supported the distinctness of the four constructs, with strong fit indices including a comparative fit index of 0.982 and a root mean square error of approximation of 0.023. Heterotrait-monotrait ratios, a modern test of discriminant validity, remained at or below 0.551, far under the 0.85 benchmark.

Common method variance, a concern whenever all measures are self-reported, was addressed both procedurally, through anonymity and neutral framing, and diagnostically: Harman's single-factor test left 33.10 percent of variance in the first unrotated factor, below the conventional 40 percent threshold, and a one-factor confirmatory model fit the data far worse than the four-factor model. Re-estimating the model with gender, age, and tenure as covariates, and again with institution-type indicators added, left the three specific indirect effects essentially unchanged, indicating the estimates are not an artifact of demographic composition or institutional mix. One result deserves particular theoretical attention.

Pairwise contrasts among the three indirect pathways did not reach significance, so the data cannot rank the fairness route, the identification route, or the serial route against one another. The author is careful not to claim equivalence, since non-significant contrasts do not establish it; the defensible conclusion is that the present data cannot order the pathways by strength. What the pattern does suggest is that the exchange-based and identity-based mechanisms are complementary rather than competing accounts of how ethical leadership relates to proactive conduct.

Each accounted for an independent share of the association, and the significant serial path is consistent with the proposed conversion, in which the fairness-based exchange route also operates through identification. For dual-process models of ethical leadership, the implication is that exchange and identity mechanisms are better modeled as cooperating channels whose joint operation, rather than their relative dominance, characterizes the association with proactive behavior. The practical reading for university governance is concrete.

For senior leaders, the findings identify the behaviors through which influence over cadre initiative appears to travel: distributive care in workload and reward allocation, transparent and consistent procedures, and respectful treatment in everyday interaction. Leadership development programs that rehearse these behaviors may yield more than abstract ethics exhortation, because fairness perceptions, not ethics rhetoric, are what cadres act on. For administrative offices, appraisal and promotion systems are the other lever, since procedures perceived as consistent and bias-free accompany the very fairness judgments that accompany both reciprocity and identification.

The author also flags important limits: the cross-sectional design cannot establish temporal ordering, and alternative sequences, such as initiative feeding back into fairness experiences, cannot be excluded; all measures were self-reported; sampling was confined to one province and relied on convenience access; collectivism was not measured, so the dual-route pattern cannot be attributed to the Chinese context; and the responsible-initiative measure was adapted rather than drawn from a validated instrument. Longitudinal, multi-center, and cross-cultural designs, along with archival indicators such as proposal submissions, would provide stronger evidence. Pending that verification, the study offers a statistically grounded map of how ethical leadership reaches the middle stratum on which university strategy turns.

Subject of Research: Cross-sectional survey research on how ethical leadership relates to responsible initiative among Chinese university middle-level cadres through organizational fairness and organizational identification

Article Title: Ethical leadership and responsible initiative among Chinese university middle-level cadres: the roles of organizational fairness and identification

Article References: Chen, L. (2026). Ethical leadership and responsible initiative among Chinese university middle-level cadres: the roles of organizational fairness and identification. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 2000079. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.2000079

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.2000079

Keywords: ethical leadership, responsible initiative, organizational fairness, organizational identification, middle-level cadres, higher education administration, social exchange theory, social identity theory, serial mediation, organizational psychology, proactive behavior, Chinese universities