Previous literature has overlooked the impact of environmental factors on the effectiveness of empowering leadership, and this study introduced the important boundary factor of environmental uncertainty as a moderating role, and constructed a moderated mediation model to investigate how empowering leadership influences employees' unethical pro-organizational behavior from a social exchange perspective. We collected data at three different time points and administered questionnaires to 431 employees. Hypotheses were tested in PROCESS using the bootstrapping method. The results showed that: (1) There was a positive relationship between empowering leadership and unethical pro-organizational behavior, and leader-member exchange played a mediating role in this relationship. (2) Environmental uncertainty played a moderating role between empowering leadership and leader-member exchange. With the increase of environmental uncertainty, the positive relationship between the two is weakened. This study contributes to leadership literature by integrating environmental uncertainty into the social exchange framework, highlighting its impact on leader-member exchange and unethical pro-organizational behavior, thereby offering fresh insights into leadership effectiveness in dynamic environments.
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