EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON ETHICAL LEADERSHIP AND KNOWLEDGE WORKERS’ INNOVATIVE BEHAVIOUR: THE MEDIATING ROLE OF JOB AUTONOMY

Introduction: This research studied the mediating role of job autonomy in the relationship between ethical leadership and knowledge workers’ innovative behaviour based on self-determination theory. Data were collected from 377 knowledge workers in the IT industry in Sichuan, Henan, and Guangdong province, China. A conceptual model was constructed and tested with the statistical software SMART-PLS. This paper concludes that job autonomy effectively mediates ethical leadership and knowledge workers’ innovative behaviour. The findings also reveal the strong and positive impact of ethical leadership on knowledge workers’ innovative behaviour. This paper enriched the leadership literature and extended the understanding of the predictors of employee innovative behaviour Objective: To investigate the impact of ethical leadership on knowledge workers’ innovative behaviour. To study the relationship between ethical leadership and job autonomy. To examine the impact of job autonomy on knowledge workers’ innovative behaviour. To investigate the mediating effect of job autonomy between ethical leadership and knowledge workers’ innovative behaviour. Theoretical Framework: Knowledge workers are highly skilled workers with professional knowledge, good education, or experience in their respective fields (Davenport, 2006). According to Correia & Dierendonck (2010), three core elements underpin the global meaning framework of knowledge workers: first, knowledge workers perceive their work as a calling; second, they have a strong desire for membership within a community of peers; third, they demand autonomy. These elements are in consistency with SDT. Method: This research used a quantitative approach to test the hypothesis, a closed questionnaire to collect the data, and SMART PLS version 4 to analyze the data. The survey questions were translated into Chinese with a back-translation approach (Brislin, 1986), as the respondents were all Chinese. Results and Discussion: Due to the single source, we first test common method bias. We adopted a full collinearity assessment approach to check the common method bias (Kock, 2015; Kock and Lynn, 2012). In this approach, the constructs were regressed on a new dummy variable with random values. As shown in table 4.1, the variance inflation factor (VIF) is lower than 3.3 (Kock, 2015), the model is indicated free of common method bias. Research Implications: The study constructed a research model to investigate the mediating effect of job autonomy between ethical leadership and knowledge workers' innovative behaviour. Management in knowledge-intensive industries, like the IT industry, can gain inspiration from the research to develop proper management strategies to promote knowledge workers’ innovative behaviour while guarding the ethical line.


INTRODUCTION
Innovation has long been recognized as an important factor positively associated with organizational performance.It helps organizations cope with challenges, survive in the unsteady economic environment, gain competitive advantages, and stay profitable in a fiercely competitive world (Hassi et al., 2022).Employees, especially knowledge workers, are the major source of organizational innovation (Musenze & Mayende, 2023).Knowledge workers are professionals with high education and income.They take on complex tasks and apply knowledge in their work (Surawski, 2019).In the process of recombining and reamplifying knowledge, knowledge workers behave creatively.It is of great importance for organizations to promote the innovative behaviour of knowledge workers (Stoffers et al.,2014).4 Being creative and innovative sometimes may cause unethical behaviours, as "thinking out of the box" may occasionally suggest going against the established norms and rules (Mai et al., 2022).Ethics is an asset for organizations (Ullah et al., 2017).Enron, Wirecard, and Luckin Coffee lost the trust of the stakeholders and suffered a great loss due to financial fraud (Peng et al., 2022).Unethical creativity may incur unwanted or undesirable behaviours from the employees (Mai et al., 2022).As information and resource distributors, leaders have a direct impact on employee innovative behaviour (Wen et al., 2021).Empowering leadership may promote employee's creative unethicality (Mai et al., 2022).Ethical leaders stress on morality and ethics, propose fair treatment and participative decision-making, and show care and respect to employees.These leadership attributes effectively promote employees' positive behaviours (Jha & Singh, 2019) and reduce the negative ones (Schwepker & Dimitriou, 2021).Extant researches have investigated the how ethical leadership (EL) is associated with innovative behaviour (IB), but the findings are often inconsistent (Musenze & Mayende, 2023).Some studies demonstrated ethical leadership has impact on employee innovative behavior (Musenze & Mayende, 2023;Wen et al., 2021;Ye et al., 2023); some argued that too much of a good effect of ethics will reduce the attitudinal and behavioural openness of the employees, make them more conformable (Stouten et al., 2013) which are essential for innovation.Given this context, we argue that more studies should be carried out to develop a better understanding of the underlying mechanism of the impact of ethical leadership on employee innovative behaviour.
Prior research has discussed the effect of job-linked factors on employee innovative behaviour, central around job crafting, feedback, work engagement, and task significance (Asif et al., 2023;Suhandiah et al., 2023;Zhu et al., 2023).Few explored job autonomy as the predictor of innovative behaviour (Hassi et al., 2022) and how job autonomy interplay between ethical leadership and innovative behaviour.Job autonomy refers to the freedom and discretion employees have over work schedules, work decisions, and work methods (Morgeson & Humphrey, 2006).Employees with great autonomy are motivated and dedicated to innovative behaviors that go beyond their regular work duties (Hernaus & Mikulic, 2014;Oldham & Da Silva, 2015).Self-determination theory also posited that the sense of control individuals have over their work may serve as a source of motivation for creative thinking (Deci & Ryan, 1985).
Organizations that try to promote employee innovative behavior must grant autonomy to employees and encourage them to be more responsible and independent.
Thus, this study centres on the innovation of knowledge workers in the IT industry in China and aims to explore the connection between ethical leadership and innovation behaviour along with the mediating effect of job autonomy.This study presented empirical evidence to expand the research of ethical leadership and innovative behaviour literature and offered suggestions on how to motivate employees to work innovatively.
The research objectives are as follows: 1) To investigate the impact of ethical leadership on knowledge workers' innovative behavior; 2) To study the relationship between ethical leadership and job autonomy; 3) To examine the impact of job autonomy on knowledge workers' innovative behavior; 4) To investigate the mediating effect of job autonomy between ethical leadership and knowledge workers' innovative behaviour.

LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Self-determination theory (SDT) (Deci & Ryan, 1985) focuses on the individual's inner motivation.It argues that people are more motivated when they feel they are able to make their own choices (autonomy), when they are capable of achieving their goals (competence), and when they feel connected and belongingness to a group (relatedness).Self-determined actions depend on the satisfaction of the three psychological needs.People with self-determination tend to seek interesting and challenging tasks, perform creatively, and behave responsibly.
Knowledge workers are highly skilled workers with professional knowledge, good education, or experience in their respective fields (Davenport, 2006) 6 Unlike traditional workers whose main job is to produce goods or services, knowledge workers generate and share ideas and information.They are ambitious to enhance their ability to overcome challenges and achieve their objectives (Serrat, 2010).They distinguish themselves with higher social status, prestige, and income.And they enjoy a certain amount of autonomy in work.To manage and motivate these workers, Serrat (2010) suggested setting "clear task objective and performance standards", create rewarding and reinforcement system, and giving them a say.
Based on SDT, this study explored the link between ethical leadership and knowledge workers' innovative behaviour, and the mediating role of job autonomy.Ethical leadership grants autonomy to knowledge workers through empowerment (Resick et al., 2006); stresses fairness and equality, listen to employees which makes the followers feel being loved and respected (Piccolo et al., 2010); makes prominent the significance of work and reinforce ethical innovations of employees though rewarding and punishment (Musenze & Mayende, 2023).To sum up, ethical leadership could satisfy the psychological needs for individual growth and motivation, resulting in employee innovation.

BEHAVIOUR
The definition of ethical leadership proposed by Brown et al., (2005) has been widely adopted in a plethora of studies.This definition discusses the demonstration and promotion of ethical conduct to employees through "personal" and "interpersonal" actions with strategies like "two-way communication", "reinforcement", and "decision-making".Ethical leaders are honest and trustworthy, emphasizing morality and altruism.They make fair judgement and provide employees with support and integrity (De Hoogh & Den Hartog, 2008).
Employee innovative behaviour refers to the generation and implementation of new ideas (Mumford et al., 2002).Idea generation involves identifying innovative solutions, and idea implementation focuses on implement innovative ideas (Scott & Bruce, 1994).
Innovation is an extra-role behaviour and accompanied by high level of risk.Ethical leaders are quite supportive even when the employees' innovation falls shot.They not only focus on results, but also evaluate followers' efforts with fairness and equality, entrust them with autonomy and opportunities for trial and error (Wang & Yang, 2018).Being free from the fear and worries, employees are inclined to innovation.Besides, fair treatment makes ethical leadership legitimate and attractive to employees to gain their support and self-regulation, 7 enhance how they perceive the effectiveness of a leader and foster a great willingness to do extra work (Brown et al., 2005).
Ethical leadership accentuates the importance of altruism at work, make employees realize the meaning of their work and feel the duty and obligation towards others, the organizations and society, so they feel obliged to seek innovations and make contributions (Wen et al., 2021).A large collection of literature have conformed the relation between ethical leadership and innovative behaivor (Asif et al., 2023;Feng et al., 2018;Musenze & Mayende, 2023;Wen et al., 2021) and we come to the hypothesis: H1. Ethical leadership is positively linked to knowledge workers' innovative behaviour.

ETHICAL LEADERSHIP AND JOB AUTONOMY
Knowledge workers is doing the "flexible and unpredictable" knowledge work, which is highly variable and less structured.They would like to make their own decisions on the work, choose the most suitable methods and follow their own working plan.They prefer less restriction and interference in their work, and demand autonomy (Davenport, 2006).
Ethical leaders share power with subordinates to allow them have a say in the decision.
They trust the employees and help them build independence and self-reliance in their work (Chughtai, 2015).Ethical leadership prioritizes the rights of the employees, and highlights freedom, equality and respects in the interpersonal relationship between leaders and followers (Xiao & Zhang, 2017).These characteristics are expected to improve employees, especially knowledge workers' sense of job autonomy.Several studies have shown the positive relations between ethical leadership and job autonomy (Chughtai, 2015;Liu et al., 2020).Therefore, we make the following hypothesis: H2. Ethical leadership positively impact job autonomy.

JOB AUTONOMY AND KNOWLEDGE WORKERS' INNOVATIVE BEHAVIOUR
According to SDT, employees who enjoy adequate discretion over their work possess a high inner motivation and are voluntarily to take the innovative duties (Lee et al., 2021).Job autonomy means the employees take the primary responsibility for the work they are doing throughout the whole working process (Lee et al., 2021).In order to achieve the desirable results, De Spiegelaere et al. ( 2016) claimed that knowledge workers have to experiment with different and novel ideas and methods to creatively solve problem and pounce on an opportunity at work ().Job autonomy can enhance intrinsic motivation, so employees are more likely to engage in creative work when they feel control over the work and less restriction on their role (Hassi et al., 2022).A wealth of literature supported the positive impact of job autonomy on innovative behavior (Hassi et al., 2022;Lee et al., 2021;Suhandiah et al. 2023).
Summarizing the information provided, we come to the following hypothesis.
H3. Job autonomy is positively associated with knowledge workers' innovative behaviour.

THE MEDIATING ROLE OF JOB AUTONOMY
Ethical leaders are considerate and treat their employees with integrity and respect, open to new information and different viewpoints from their followers, making fair decision, which will enhance employees' perception of freedom and autonomy (De Hoogh & Den Hartog, 2008).Therefore, employees feel satisfied and are willing to report problems to their leaders.
And they tend to produce, promote, and apply new ideas and methods to their work, as autonomy is related to the inner motivation of employees (Suhandiah et al., 2023).So we make the following hypothesis: H4. Job autonomy mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and knowledge workers' innovative behaviour.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This research used a quantitative approach to test the hypothesis, a closed questionnaire to collect the data, and SMART PLS version 4 to analyse the data.The survey questions were translated into Chinese with a back-translation approach (Brislin, 1986), as the respondents were all Chinese.calculator Rao software (Memon et al., 2020).Online questionnaires with a letter have been distributed to the respondents to ensure the anonymity and confidentiality of the study.

INSTRUMENT
Knowledge workers' innovative behaviour was measured with a 6-item scale designed by Hu et al. (2009).It is a modified scale of Scott and Bruce (1994), which is the most widely used scale for innovative behaviour.7 items are adopted from the scale designed by Brown et al., (2005) to measure ethical leadership, which is commonly used in ethical leadership study.
The scale of Job autonomy is adopted from the Work Design Questionnaire (Morgeson & Humphrey, 2006).There are 9 items on the scale.The measurements for the 3 variables are popular and widely used in the previous literature.

RESULTS
Due to the single source, we first test common method bias.We adopted a full collinearity assessment approach to check the common method bias (Kock, 2015;Kock and Lynn, 2012).In this approach, the constructs were regressed on a new dummy variable with random values.As shown in table 1, the variance inflation factor (VIF) is lower than 3.3 (Kock, 2015), the model is indicated free of common method bias.for internal consistency, while convergent validity is assessed using Average variance extracted (AVE).For the discriminant validity, the HTMT approach and Fornell-Larcker criterion are assessed.

Figure 1
Hypothesis testing As shown in table 2, Cronbach's alpha coefficients range from 0.924 to 0.953, which are greater than the recommended value of 0.7 (Gefen et al., 2000), effectively indicating good reliability of the scales measuring the constructs.The value of CRs ranges from 0.940 to 0.960, higher than the threshold value of 0.7 (Hair et al., 2019), which adequately signifies the items are internally consistent.Table 1 also shows the AVEs are far more than the recommended value of 0.5 (Fornell & Larcker, 1981), so the convergent validity is satisfactory.Factor loadings are displayed in Figure 1, and the results show the factor loadings of all indicators in this research are acceptable since the values meet the required threshold of 0.7 (Hair et al., 2019).4 displays the assessment results for discriminant validity.Table 2 displays the HTMT values of the constructs.From the results, we can see the HTMT values are below 0.85 (Henseler et al., 2015;Franke & Sarstedt, 2019), which suggests a distinction among these constructs.Table 3 shows results of the square root of the AVEs of each construct, marked in bold type, are greater than the coefficient of correlation between that construct and the other constructs in the model (Fornell & Larcker, 1981), indicating a good discriminant validity.In conclusion, the above validity tests signify that the research instruments have good reliability and validity.

STRUCTURAL MODEL
In the structural model, the PLS algorithm and bootstrapping method were used to test the hypotheses and mediating effect.The bootstrapping used 5000 iterations (Ramayah et al., 2018).To achieve a sound assessment of the hypothesis, p values, combined with confidence intervals and effect sizes were utilized (Hahn & Ang, 2017).First, we tested the combined effect of the exogenous variable on the endogenous variable.As is shown in Table 5, the value of R 2 for JA is 0.340 and the adjusted R 2 is 0.339, which means the EL explained 33.9% of the variance in JA; and the value of R 2 for KWIB is 0.504 and the adjusted R 2 is 0.501, which shows EL and JA explain 50% of the variance in KWIB.According to Hair et al. (2014), the value of R 2 is higher than 0.75 indicating a substantial explanatory power, R 2 is above 0.50 indicating an explanatory power, while R 2 is above 0.25 indicating explanatory power.Therefore, the results show the two exogenous variables acquired an adequate power level.The testing results of the hypothesis were displayed in Table 4.6.All hypotheses tested are supported as the t-values are above 1.96 and the P-values are lower than 0.005.Ethical leadership has a significant and positive effect on job autonomy (ß=0.584,t=12.319, and p=0.000).Ethical leadership has a significant and positive effect on knowledge workers' innovative behaviour (ß=0.185,t=3.836 and p=0.000).Job autonomy has a significant and positive effect on knowledge workers' innovative behaviour (ß=0.586,t=12.645 and p=0.000).
The mediating effect of job autonomy between ethical leadership and knowledge workers' innovative behaviour is also significant and positive (ß=0.342,t=9.579 and p=0.000).The results were further confirmed by the fact that none of the confidence intervals bias corrected 95% straddle a 0. 13 The Effect size f² signifies how much effect an exogenous latent construct has on an endogenous latent construct.Cohen (1988) proposed substantial effects with a magnitude of f² at 0.35, 0.15 for moderate effects, and 0.02 for small effects.The results from Table 4.6 show ethical leadership has a strong effect on job autonomy but a weak effect on knowledge workers' innovative behaviour.Job autonomy has a strong effect on knowledge workers' innovative behaviour.
Q² is used to assess the predictive relevance of the proposed model.It is based on the blindfolding procedure which can only be applied to endogenous constructs with reflective measurements.When the Q² value exceeds 0, it signifies the predictive relevance of the proposed model for a specific endogenous construct (Hair et al., 2017).Hair et al. (2019) recommended the Q² values (0, 0.25, 0.5) for small, medium, and large predictive relevance respectively.The Q² of JA and KWIB were 0.243 and 0.359, indicating a moderate predictive relevance.

DISCUSSION
The current study aimed to investigate the association between ethical leadership and knowledge workers' innovative behaviour, and the mediating role of job autonomy based on self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985).Consistent with SDT, the study found ethical leadership cultivates a trust-based relationship with the knowledge workers, fostering a feeling of mental safety, satisfying knowledge workers' inner demand for autonomy by granting freedom and discretion in their job, which may transform into the inner motivation for innovation.
These study findings reveal that ethical leadership can promote knowledge workers' innovative behaviour, which also conforms to the findings of the previous literature (Ye et al., 2023) that ethical leaders focus on fairness and equity, engage knowledge workers to make decisions, and highlight the significance of the work (Musenze & Mayende, 2023), therefore, the knowledge workers are more willingly to pursue risk-involved ventures, such as innovation.
The findings also corroborate findings (Chughtai, 2015) that ethical leadership is positively related to knowledge workers' job autonomy.Ethical leaders "share power" with their followers by listening to their ideas and concerns, enabling them to participate in decisionmaking (Resick et al., 2006), granting employees a sense of self-control and self-reliance 14 (Piccolo et al., 2010), which may provide intrinsic motivation for employees to take innovative activities to achieve the organizational goals (Liu et al., 2020).
The current study demonstrates job autonomy has a positive impact on knowledge workers' innovative behaviour.This conclusion follows the extant literature ( (Suhandiah et al., 2023); (Hassi et al., 2022) (Lee et al., 2021)).Job autonomy enhances employees' motivation and efforts to go beyond the required performance and perform creatively ( (Hernaus & Mikulic, 2014).
This study extended the understanding of the influence of ethical leadership on knowledge workers' innovative behaviour and the mediating role of job autonomy.The strength of this study is it centers on knowledge workers' innovative behaviour, few specified this group of employees in their research.The study enriched leadership literature.The mediating effect of job autonomy between ethical leadership and employee innovative behaviour is rarely discussed.

THEORETICAL IMPLICATION
The study constructed a research model to investigate the mediating effect of job autonomy between ethical leadership and knowledge workers' innovative behaviour.
Management in knowledge-intensive industries, like the IT industry, can gain inspiration from the research to develop proper management strategies to promote knowledge workers' innovative behaviour while guarding the ethical line.
This study contributed to the theoretical improvement in the following aspects.First, it broadens the understanding of the underlying mechanism of ethical leadership on knowledge workers' innovative behavior.The results show that ethical leadership has a direct and indirect influence on knowledge workers' innovative behavior.The direct impact of ethical leadership is small, but with the mediating effect of job autonomy, the effect size of ethical leadership increased.The findings added value to the extant literature.
Second, it offers a fresh perspective on the study of the relation between ethical leadership on knowledge workers' innovative behavior.Job characteristics have been examined as the mediation, which addressed the research gap identified in the extant literature (Wen et al., 2021).ethical failure can lead to a crisis of trust and cause a disaster for a corporation (Peng et al., 2022).Unethical innovation is even more harmful (Coonan, 2016).Ethical leaders can help reduce the unethical behaviors of the employees, and provide guidance or bottom line for the employees (Liu et al., 2020), thus creating a relatively safe environment to promote employee innovative behaviour.So, organizations should prioritize ethics when promoting or hiring leaders.
Secondly, the findings show evidence that job characteristics (autonomy) are positively related to knowledge workers' innovative behavior.Since COVID-19, great changes have taken place in job characteristics (such as remote work).And it may become the norm at work in the future.In order to respond to the uncertainty in the work, less supervision and more discretion have been granted to employees, which will certainly increase the management difficulty and challenge.Therefore, management needs to adjust their strategies to cope with the increasingly complex external and internal environment.
Third, as knowledge workers have become a major source of organizational innovation activities, how to manage those workers and promote their innovative behavior is of great importance for organizations to gain competitive advantages in the global economy.
Management should know the characteristics of those knowledge workers, meet their work demands, and foster their inner motivations, so as to achieve better organizational performance.

LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE STUDIES
There are some limitations in this study.First, the data in this study comes from a single source.In order to reduce common method bias, future research can collect data from multiple sources.Second, this study focused on the knowledge workers in the IT industry in China, and the different findings may be achieved in other industries or countries.So future research needs to be applied to multiple industries and more countries and regions.Third, this study only included the mediating effect, and the moderating effect hasn't been discussed.Future studies can take new mediating and moderating variables into consideration.

Empirical
Research on Ethical Leadership and Knowledge Workers' Innovative Behaviour: The Mediating Role of Job Autonomy ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.1 | p.1research was collected with the probability sampling approach and simple random sampling technique among the knowledge workers in the IT industry in Sichuan, Henan, and Guangdong Province, China.The sample size of 377 was calculated by the online

Empirical
Research on Ethical Leadership and Knowledge Workers' Innovative Behaviour: The Mediating Role of Job Autonomy ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.1 | p.1-20 | e06703 | 2024.15 5.3 PRACTICAL IMPLICATION The results of the current study have provided 3 important practical implications for the IT industry and other knowledge-intensive industries or corporations.Firstly, ethical leadership, as an integral part of management should be highlighted since the results demonstrate a positive relationship between ethical leadership and knowledge workers' innovative behavior.Business

Empirical
Research on Ethical Leadership and Knowledge Workers' Innovative Behaviour: The Mediating Role of Job Autonomy ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.1 | p.1-20 | e06703 | 2024.16 5.5 CONCLUSIONThis study investigated the relationship between ethical leadership and knowledge workers' innovative behaviour.Quantitative analysis has been adopted to test the hypothesis and make important conclusions.Based on SDT, to promote knowledge workers' innovative behaviour, organizations should take the features of these workers into consideration, and development optimal managing strategies to make knowledge workers feel the sense of selfdetermination.So autonomy should be granted and the significance of work should be stress through ethical leadership.

Table 1
Full Collinearity Testing

Table 2
Construct reliability and validity note: JA, job autonomy; KWIB, knowledge workers' innovative behaviour; EL, ethical leadership

Table 3 and
Table