Despite the pivotal role of leader traits in leadership literature, investigations into leader’s greed have predominantly focused on intra-individual outcomes. This study aims to address this gap by 1) exploring the interactive effect between leader’s greed and employee’s integrity identity on employee’s voice behavior, and 2) revealing the mechanism of perceived leader’s immoral encouragement. Drawing on social learning theory, this study employs three time-lagged surveys to examine these relationships. Study 1, with 232 employees nested in 62 teams, finds that leader’s greed and employee’s integrity identity interact to influence upward voice behavior, such that the relationship is positive when integrity identity is high. Study 2, involving 258 full-time employees, confirms that the perceived leader immoral encouragement mediates this effect. Study 3, conducted with 301 employees recruited via a snowball sampling, replicates these findings and tests the full proposed model. Our study takes the first step to explore the inter-individual outcomes of leader’s greed. Three studies consistently highlight the critical role of employees’ integrity identity in buffering the detrimental effects of leader’s greed on employees’ psychological and behavioral outcomes. Our study contributes to the trait and leadership literatures.
