Preethi Misha, Society for Business Ethics member and Emerging Scholar and Founders’ award recipient (2018) successfully defended her PhD on November 20, 2020 at Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University. Dr. Misha’s PhD explored how unethical leadership trickles down from the top to the lower levels of the hierarchy. The dissertation consisted of two studies. The first study recruited 33 interviewees within the financial services sector to explore how followers’ meaning-making can influence the cascading of unethical leadership. The second study recruited 205 participants in leader-follower dyads and investigated if followers’ search for meaning at work can allow or constrain trickle-down effects of unethical leadership.

The supervision team consisted of Prof. Marius van Dijke and Dr. Nadia Kougiannou. Preethi provides sincere thanks to the examiners for the defence – Prof. Edward Freeman and Dr. Jeroen Camps and the defence chair Prof. Thom Baguley. Preethi would like to thank her supervisors, colleagues at NBS, SBE colleagues, and a special thanks to Prof. Marius van Dijke for his kind support throughout these five years. Preethi is now a senior lecturer at Nottingham Business School and is actively involved in unethical leadership research.