Ethical Leadership and Employee Behavior Essay

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Behavioral Integrity

Davis and Rothstein (2006) conducted a meta-analysis about the effects of perceived behavioral integrity of managers on employee behavior. Their analysis only included 12 studies, which is small for a meta-analysis, illustrating perhaps that this is a thinly-studied subject. They found that in these studies there was a "strong positive overall relationship between the perceived behavioral integrity of managers and the employee attitudes of job satisfaction, organizational commitment, satisfaction with the leader and affect towards the organization" (p407). They also identified in their study a couple of potential moderators for this relationship, including the gender of the employee and the distance between employee and leader in the organizational structure, and considered that future studies could examine these moderators further.

Kottke & Pelletier (2013) looked at how to measure the perceptions of supervisor and top leader ethics in an organization. Their exploration sought to build on prior work (of Pelletier), using the Perceptions of Ethical Leadership Scale, to differentiate between immediate supervisor and top leader in terms of how the perceptions of the ethics of those leaders are formed and measured. This study is important because followers will have much closer connections with their immediate supervisor. They might perceive that person's ethical behavior quite differently because they see he/she work every day, when compared with the CEO who may be very distant from the everyday employees.

Cohen et al. (2015) conducted a survey of healthcare employees to rate the ethics of their organization. In this study, the authors used the IntegratedEthics Staff Survey, which was developed by the Department of Veteran's Affairs in 2014. This methodology was used with Veteran's Health Administration employees to evaluate eight attributes of an ethical organization, and how the employees perceived these attributes in their own organization.

Similarities

There are some obvious similarities between these three papers. First, they all reflect on the general issue of organizational ethics. The subject is a good general subject for which there is a lot of literature, and these papers each address a different take on how that subject is interpreted in their own industries. Organizational ethics often begin at the top of the organization, and the attitudes of those in leadership positions with respect to ethics will typically influence the attitudes that those further down the organizational chart have with respect to ethics. This common upper-level theme binds the three papers even where there are differences in the lower-level themes and topics.

A second theme that is common to the papers is the influence of leadership ethics on the ethics of the followers. The Davis study makes this the focal point, but the other studies contribute to this theme as well. The Davis study is a meta-analysis of a dozen other studies on this subject, aiming to prove the link between the ethics of leadership, how those ethics are perceived, and what influence that those perceptions have on the ethics of the followers in an organization. The other two studies are more concerned with the measurement of the perceptions, but both do so with specific intent to provide a framework for understanding how perceptions of leadership ethics are formed in an organization. They are, in essence, providing something on which to build future studies. Those studies would theoretically end up in a meta-analysis such as the one in the Davis study.

The Kottke and Cohen papers both work with different ways of measuring perceptions, but the importance of measuring perception is that it can refine the study of how that perception influences employee attitudes and behaviors. Perception is notoriously difficult to measure, but it opens up a lot of understanding if it can be measured effectively. For example, it can allow for understanding how employees form their perceptions, and further it can provide insight into how leaders can ensure that there are no gaps between actual ethical performance and perceptions that exist throughout the organization. It is important to remember that employees have different motivations, and sometimes entirely different values, than the leaders of organizations, and that those will influence how ethical leadership is perceived.

The final common theme is the type of measures that are being used. The Kottke and Cohen papers address this specifically. They each work with a different methodology for measuring employee perceptions. The Kottke paper builds on the system that Pelletier developed, the Perceptions of Ethical Leadership Scale, while the Cohen study was done for the VA, using a scale that was specifically developed for that group. That there is no one common method for measuring perceptions is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does reflect the relatively nascent stage of this research.

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Moreover, it lends an argument to the idea that a meta-analysis is important, even when the sample size is small. The different studies in a meta-analysis might all have been conducted with a different methodology for measuring perceptions of ethical leadership.

That there are different measures means that only a meta-analysis will truly be able to identify the links that exist. This is because different studies measure perceptions differently, so to smooth out the variability that will exist by way of using different models to measure perceptions, the meta-analysis can deliver a more robust result, should it find that throughout all measures of perception that there is still a link between the perceptions that employees have of ethics of their managers is correlated with their own ethical behavior. Since the meta-analysis makes that finding, that is a good indication that variability between the different perception measurement methods is not an explanatory factor for the results of the different studies -- the key independent variable (perceptions) and dependent variables (employee behavior) are isolate by way of the meta-analysis. So these three papers highlight the value of the meta-analysis to account for the fact that different methods of measuring employee perceptions are used.

Conclusions

One of the interesting conclusions that can be drawn between these studies is that there is a lot of work to be done with respect to understanding how perceptions of ethical behavior are informed. The Cohen study was done in 2014, so fairly recently, and introduced a new means of measuring perceptions. Both new means of measuring perceptions were introduced after the Davis meta-analysis. Given these time frames, it is clear that the study is continuing to evolve, and new ideas are still being introduced. It would actually be worthwhile to examine a newer meta-analysis to see if the Davis findings still hold up with these subsequent papers, and subsequent methodology introductions.

Another takeaway from these papers is that there is a clear link between how employees perceive the ethics of their leadership and the behaviors and attitudes that they themselves have. This cuts across whatever different methodology is used to determine the perceptions of ethics among leaders. Each employee might have his/her own means of forming an ethical perception, and expressing it, but ultimately if the employee feels that there is a high level of ethics with respect to the organization and its leadership, then the employee is more likely to behave in an ethical manner. This finding supports other studies that have identified the role that leaders play in the formation of organizational culture (Tsai, 2011). Ethical culture is just one aspect of that. Leaders set the cultural tone for the organization, and the followers will pick up on that.

While the studies did not outline the mechanisms by which employees form their perceptions, that is another valid thread of research for the future study on this subject. At this point, there is significant value in the lessons that are being conveyed. One of the most important is that ethical leadership is critical to having an ethical organization. Leaders have a significant amount of power over followers -- they have formal power, but they also have informal power. When there is a lack of ethics, and the followers perceive that, then the followers are likely to, well, follow.

Another interesting thread of study here is what happens when the leadership is perceived as lacking in ethics, but the followers have their own strong sense of ethics. What happens when the followers reject the ethics of the leaders? This thread of inquiry is pointed out because there are sometimes significant gaps between leadership ethics and the ethics of the proverbial rank-and-file, especially when the consequences to those groups are taken into account. A good example would be WorldCom, a company where the ethics of the leadership were quite different, and it was ultimately people within that company's auditing department that brought the leaders down (Kennedy, 2012). The Kottke study in particular aims in this direction, highlighting that different levels of leadership will likely have different influences on the ethical behaviors of employees, and that indeed the employees will perceive the ethics of leaders at different levels differently. Indeed, they should -- the stakes are different for people at different levels so values, ethics, and perceptions should be expected to differ, even when other elements of….....

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