Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing

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Abstract

Leaders should be a key source of ethical guidance for employees. Yet, little empirical research focuses on an ethical dimension of leadership. We propose social learning theory as a theoretical basis for understanding ethical leadership and offer a constitutive definition of the ethical leadership construct. In seven interlocking studies, we investigate the viability and importance of this construct. We develop and test a new instrument to measure ethical leadership, examine the proposed connections of ethical leadership with other constructs in a nomological network, and demonstrate its predictive validity for important employee outcomes. Specifically, ethical leadership is related to consideration behavior, honesty, trust in the leader, interactional fairness, socialized charismatic leadership (as measured by the idealized influence dimension of transformational leadership), and abusive supervision, but is not subsumed by any of these. Finally, ethical leadership predicts outcomes such as perceived effectiveness of leaders, followers’ job satisfaction and dedication, and their willingness to report problems to management.

Section snippets

Ethical leadership in prior research

Most reviews of the behavioral science (rather than philosophical) literature on leadership have given scant attention to its ethical dimensions (e.g., Bass, 1990, House and Aditya, 1997). However, we have identified three constructs in organizational behavior (OB) that have the potential to overlap with ethical leadership, and we discuss their distinctions below.

Ethical leadership as social learning

Leadership involves influence (Yukl, 2002). A social learning perspective on ethical leadership proposes that leaders influence the ethical conduct of followers via modeling. The term modeling covers a broad range of psychological matching processes, including observational learning, imitation, and identification. According to Bandura (1986) virtually anything that can be learned via direct experience can also be learned by vicarious experience, via observing others’ behavior and its

A constitutive definition of ethical leadership

We define ethical leadership here as the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making. The first component of this constitutive definition, “demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships…” suggests that those who are perceived to be ethical leaders model conduct

Trait and nomological validity of ethical leadership

Construct validity involves both trait and nomological validity (Campbell, 1960, Edwards, 2003). For the current effort, trait validity would be demonstrated if operationalizations of ethical leadership converged with one another, and diverged from measures of unrelated constructs. Nomological validity is assessed based on how much systematic support there is for theoretically proposed connections between ethical leadership, its antecedents, correlates, and outcomes. Because this is the first

Measure development

In developing the measure, we followed the steps advocated in the psychometric literature (e.g., Ghiselli, Campbell, & Zedeck, 1981) and summarized by Hinkin (1998). We wanted an instrument that: (a) spanned the full domain of our definition, (b) was composed of items that were understandable to working adults, and that (c) was concise enough to use in a variety of research settings, without taxing the energy of respondents. Our measure was developed in seven different studies using different

Discussion

Although much has been said about the importance of ethical leadership, the topic has received little systematic scholarly attention (Ciulla, 1998). And, an ethical leadership construct has not yet been precisely defined or adequately measured. Little theoretical or empirical work has been done to understand its theoretical base or its connection to related constructs and outcomes. Our research begins that work by using social learning as a theoretical foundation, by developing an explicit,

Perceptual biases

We found that ethical leadership is not associated with social desirability bias, cynical beliefs, or perceived similarity with the supervisor. But, because some of our studies involved data from a single source, some of the reported relationships may be affected by common method bias. However, given that correlations between the ELS and other variables ranged systematically (in proposed ways) in magnitude and direction, and that confirmatory factor analysis indicated that better fitting models

Conclusion

Concerns about ethics and leadership have dominated recent headlines about business and shaken public confidence in many organizations. Now, more than ever, rigorous, systematic research on ethical leadership is needed. We have developed the ethical leadership construct to overcome some of the fractious nature of past treatments. By basing such a construct on a foundation of social learning theory, constructing a reliable and construct valid measure of it, and demonstrating its predictive

Acknowledgments

This article is based upon a study initiated and funded by the Ethics Resource Center Fellows Program. We thank Jeffrey R. Edwards, action editor on this manuscript, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on drafts of this article. We also thank Gary Weaver and Laura Hartman for assisting us with data collection.

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