Improving the ‘‘Leader–Follower’’ Relationship: Top Manager or Supervisor? The Ethical Leadership Trickle-Down Effect on Follower Job Response Pablo Ruiz Carmen Ruiz Ricardo Martı ´nez ABSTRACT. Since time immemorial, the phenomenon of leadership and its understanding has attracted the attention of the business world because of its important role in human groups. Nevertheless, for years efforts to understand this concept have only been centred on people in leadership roles, thus overlooking an important aspect in its understanding: the necessary moral dimension which is implicit in the relationship between leader and follower. As an illustrative example of the importance of considering good morality in leadership, an empirical study is conducted in which a good performance of the ‘‘leader–follower’’ relationship is reflected when indi- viduals perceive ethical leadership in higher hierarchical managerial levels. To be precise, findings of this study demonstrate that follower job response is improved through an ethics trickle-down partial effect from the Top Manager to the immediate supervisor, and also reveal both key aspects and managerial level on which the practice of ethical leadership should rest upon to have a stronger effect on the follower positive job response. Practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are finally presented. KEY WORDS: ethics, job response, leadership, ‘‘leader–follower’’ relationship, trickle-down effect ABBREVIATIONS: SDB: Social desirability bias; SEL: Supervisor’s ethical leadership; TMEL: Top Manager’s ethical leadership Introduction Due to its importance in human groups, the concept of leadership is one of the organizational topics that have most intrigued researchers for centuries (Burns, 1978). However, aside from the high number of studies about leadership (Bass, 1990), only a few are concerned with the moral dimension of leadership as a means to better understand this concept. This aspect only started to attract interest from academics when the concern for understanding the wholeness of the ‘‘leadership’’ phenomenon arose amongst them, implying to have a focus on the two main characters involved in the relationship: both the leader and the follower (Bass, 1990; Burns, 1978; Gini, 1997; Greenleaf, 1977, 1979). When this perspective is taken into consideration the moral dimension of the process of leadership necessarily arises and attracts the attention of academics and professionals in the business world. Any relationship requires mutual trust in order to be optimal (Kouzes and Posner, 2002) and trust needs, in turn, good morality (Trevin ˜o et al., 2000). As a consequence, scholars have started to give the role of wielding good morality major importance on the part of the leader to better understand that phenomenon, thus getting the optimum out of the relationship between the leader and the follower (Bass, 1990; Burns, 1978; Greenleaf, 1977, 1979; Perez-Lopez, 1998). In spite of this, the attention paid to empirical research in this aspect is still very limited. Rather, the study on ethical leadership is still infant (Mayer et al., 2009), and knowledge about what exactly ethical leadership phenomenon comprises is not plentiful (Toor and Ofori, 2009). Furthermore, the call of Brown and Trevin ˜o (2006) for future research to demonstrate a trickle-down effect on ethics from top to bottom is scarcely explored (e.g. Mayer et al., 2009) and absent when we emphasize on the necessary identification of the managerial level (Top Management vs. supervisor) which is more Journal of Business Ethics (2011) 99:587–608 Ó Springer 2010 DOI 10.1007/s10551-010-0670-3