TY - JOUR
T1 - Ethical leadership
T2 - A social learning perspective for construct development and testing
AU - Brown, Michael E.
AU - Treviño, Linda K.
AU - Harrison, David A.
N1 - Funding Information:
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.
Copyright:
Copyright 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2005/7
Y1 - 2005/7
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.002
DO - 10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.002
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:19944403312
SN - 0749-5978
VL - 97
SP - 117
EP - 134
JO - Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
JF - Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
IS - 2
ER -