LAUSR

Drawing on social cognitive theory, we build a comprehensive understanding of how, why, and when exploitative leadership relates to employee expediency by identifying moral disengagement as one psychological mechanism and Chinese traditionality as one boundary condition. To test our model, we administrated a three-wave survey to collect data from 350 employees in China. The results showed that exploitative leadership was positively related to employee expediency and that moral disengagement mediated this relationship. Additionally, we found that Chinese traditionality buffered the positive relationship between exploitative leadership and moral disengagement as well as the indirect effect of exploitative leadership on employee expediency through moral disengagement. Theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.