SUMMARY LEADERSHIP AND ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE
Table of Contents
Lecture 1 readings ........................................................................................................................... 2
Brown, Trevino, & Harrison (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct
development and testing .......................................................................................................................................................... 2
Hogg (2001). A Social Identity Theory of Leadership ................................................................................................. 4
Settoon, Bennett, & Liden (1996). Social exchange in organizations: Perceived organizational
support, leader–member exchange, and employee reciprocity ............................................................................. 9
Lecture 1 ..................................................................................................................................................... 10
Lecture 2 readings ......................................................................................................................... 10
Kanfer, R., Frese, M., & Johnson, R. E. (2017). Motivation related to work: A century of progress...... 10
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task
motivation: A 35-year odyssey ........................................................................................................................................... 17
Gagne & Deci (2005). Self-determination theory and work motivation. ......................................................... 18
Parker, S. K., Bindl, U. K., & Strauss, K. (2010). Making things happen: A model of proactive
motivation.................................................................................................................................................................................... 24
Farrington, J. (2012). Procrastination—Not all it's put off to be. ........................................................................ 28
Lecture 2 ..................................................................................................................................................... 29
Lecture 3 readings ......................................................................................................................... 29
Barney & Wright (1998)........................................................................................................................................................ 29
Ployhart, Nyberg, Reilly, & Maltarich (2014) ............................................................................................................... 32
Buller & McEvoy (2012) ........................................................................................................................................................ 37
Su, Wright, & Ulrich (2018) .................................................................................................................................................. 42
Lecture 4 readings ......................................................................................................................... 45
Thomas & Ely (1996) .............................................................................................................................................................. 45
Lecture 5 readings ......................................................................................................................... 49
Schein (1990) ............................................................................................................................................................................. 49
Chatman & Cha (2003) ........................................................................................................................................................... 53
Kotrba et al. (2012) ................................................................................................................................................................. 56
Edwards & Cable (2009) ....................................................................................................................................................... 60
Notes 1 ......................................................................................................................................................... 64
Blue = concept
Orange = lecture
Green = note
, Lecture 1 readings
Brown, Trevino, & Harrison (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning
perspective for construct development and testing
Instead of looking at ‘how’ leaders should behave. This paper looks at what characterizes ethical
leadership, and how it relates to other variables in its nomological network. They (a) review
related literature; (b) propose social learning or social cognitive theory as a conceptual basis for
understanding ethical leadership; (c) offer a formal, constitutive definition of ethical leadership;
(d) develop a nomological network that specifies and explains its connections to other
variables; (e) build and refine an instrument, the Ethical Leadership Scale (ELS), to measure the
construct, estimate its psychometric properties, and provide evidence of its construct validity;
and, (f) demonstrate the utility of an ethical leadership construct by showing its ability to
uniquely predict outcomes beyond other, related leadership dimensions.
Ethical leadership in prior research
The authors have identified we have three constructs in organizational behavior (OB) that have
the potential to overlap with ethical leadership: (1) transformational charismatic leadership, (2)
leader honesty, (3) considerate/fair treatment.
1. Ethical leadership and transformational/charismatic leadership
Four dimensions of transformational leadership: (a) inspirational motivation, (b)
idealized influence, (c) individualized consideration, and (d) intellectual stimulation. The
idealized influence dimension has been defined as having an ethical component. This is
being a “role model for followers to emulate”. They “can be counted on to do the right
thing” and they demonstrate “high standards of ethical and moral conduct”.
At best, there is only partial overlap between transformational and ethical leadership.
Ethical leaders likely use both transformational and transactional leadership
approaches to influence followers’ behavior.
2. Leader honesty
Survey research frequently links perceived leadership effectiveness with leader honesty
(i.e., truth-telling), integrity (i.e., principled behavior), or trustworthiness. Honesty and
integrity are seen as important components of a transformational leader’s
idealized influence. Even though leader trustworthiness and honesty might contribute
to ethical leadership, they are unlikely to be the same construct.
3. Ethical leadership and considerate or fair treatment
Leader behaviors reflect a concern for people and fair treatment of employees
contribute to perceptions of ethical leadership. However, ethical leadership goes beyond
considerate and fair treatment (e.g., setting ethical expectations for followers). Thus,
considerate, and fair treatment of followers appears to overlap with ethical leadership,
but not completely.
Though ethical leadership is related to these other leader styles and characteristics, none of
these is broad enough to encompass all that an ethical leader is seen to do. They all suffer from a
‘deficiency bias’ when compared with ethical leadership on its own and they do not provide us
with theoretical knowledge regarding ethical leadership and its outcomes.
Ethical leadership as social learning
Leadership involves influence. A social learning perspective on ethical leadership proposes that
leaders influence the ethical conduct of followers via modeling. Employees can learn what
behavior is expected, rewarded, and punished via role modeling. Leaders are an important +
likely source of such modeling due to (a) their assigned role, (b) their status and success in the
organization, and (c) their power to affect the behavior and outcomes of others. Role modeling
is often considered essential leader behavior and the idealized influence dimension of
transformational leadership views transformational leaders as role models.
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,Attention to the leader and leader behaviors
Ethical leaders are models of ethical conduct who become the targets of identification and
emulation for followers. For leaders to be perceived as ethical leaders and to influence ethics-
related outcomes, they must be perceived as attractive, credible, and legitimate. They do this by
engaging in behavior that is seen as normatively appropriate (e.g., openness and honesty) and
motivated by altruism (e.g., treating employees fairly and considerately). Ethical leaders must
also gain followers’ attention to the ethics message by engaging in explicit ethics-related
communication and by using reinforcement to support the ethics message. The longer version of
this can be found at the end of this summary ☺ (See Notes 1).
A constitutive definition of ethical leadership
The authors define ethical leadership as the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct
through personal actions and interpersonal relationship, and the promotion of such conduct to
followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making. They then go
on to discuss each part of this definition in detail.
Ethical leadership emerges out of a combination of characteristics and behaviors that include
demonstrating integrity and high ethical standards, considerate and fair treatment of
employees, and holding employees accountable for ethical conduct.
Predictions
The authors predictions and findings concerning different
validities:
The authors wanted to create an instrument for measuring
ethical leadership that: a) spanned the full domain of their
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 setting, without taxing
the energy of respondents. To ensure that the measure was
psychometrically sound, they followed systematic
procedures for developing new measures, using multiple
types of samples and steps to support content coverage,
discriminant validity, nomological validity and predictive
power beyond existing constructs (incremental validity). See
notes 1 for more info.
Results
The authors came up with the Ethical Leadership Scale (ELS) that consists of 10 items. It was
shown to have excellent internal consistency (α > .91), and good convergent and discriminant
validity. They showed that the ELS: a) is robust to large and widely recognized perceptual
errors, b) is specific enough to direct respondents’ attention to patterns of leader traits and
behavior, and c) is largely free from “similar to me” bias.
Finally, ELS predicts an important combined criterion of outcomes—satisfaction with the
leader, perceived leader effectiveness, job dedication (willing to give extra effort to one’s
job), and followers’ willingness
to report problems to
management—beyond the effects
of idealized influence, arguably the
closest conceptual cousin to ethical
leadership in the literature. This
shows incremental validity. See
also Figure 1.
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, Discussion
Social learning theory suggests that ethical leadership should influence employees’ ethical
conduct at work because ethical leaders are attractive and legitimate models who attract and
hold followers’ attention. In addition, they convey the importance of and role model ethical
behavior, and they use the reward system to hold employees accountable. We demonstrated
that employees whose supervisor is perceived to be an ethical leader are more willing to engage
in proactive helpful behavior such as reporting problems to management. Future research
should investigate whether unethical behaviors (such as employee theft, sabotage, lying to one’s
supervisor, etc.) are also reduced.
Hogg (2001). A Social Identity Theory of Leadership
Commentary on leadership research and a new direction
Leaders may emerge, maintain their position, be effective, and so forth, because of basic social
cognitive processes that cause people:
1. To conceive of themselves in terms of the defining features of a common and distinctive
ingroup (i.e., self-categorization, or identification, in terms of the ingroup prototype)
2. To assimilate themselves cognitively and behaviorally to these features (i.e., cognitive,
and behavioral depersonalization in terms of the ingroup prototype producing ingroup
stereotypic or normative perceptions, attitudes, feelings, and behaviors)
3. To perceive others not as unique individuals but through the lens of features that define
relevant ingroup or outgroup membership (i.e., perceptual depersonalization of others
in terms of the ingroup or outgroup prototype, producing stereotypical
homogenization).
If leadership is produced by these group processes contingent on psychologically belonging to
the group, then having the prototypical or normative characteristics of a psychologically salient
ingroup (i.e., being a prototypical ingroup member) may at least be important for leadership as
being charismatic or having schema-consistent characteristics of a particular type of category of
leader (i.e., being schematic of a nominal leader category).
Social identity and self-categorization
Social identity and intergroup relations
Tajfel (1972) introduced the idea of social identity to theorize how people conceptualize
themselves in intergroup contexts, how a system of social categorization “creates and defines an
individual’s own place in society. He defined social identity as the individual’s knowledge that he
belongs to certain social groups together with some emotional and value significance to him of
this group membership. Because groups only exist in relation to other groups, they derive their
descriptive and evaluative properties, and thus their social meaning, in relation to these other
groups.
Furthermore, because social identity is self-evaluative and derives its value from the
evaluative properties of the ingroup, social comparisons between groups are focused on
establishing evaluative positive distinctiveness for one’s own group. Intergroup relations
involve a process of competition for positive identity in which groups and their members strive
to protect or enhance positive distinctiveness and positive social identity. The specific way this
occurs is governed by people’s subjective understanding of the psychological permeability of
group boundaries and the stability and legitimacy of status relations between groups.
Self-esteem
The drive for evaluative positive social identity through positive distinctiveness is underpinned
by a basic human need for positive self-esteem, a self-enhancement motive. The implication is
that self-esteem motivates social identification and group behavior, and social identification
satisfies the need for self-esteem. Research suggests a distinction between individual and group
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