Ethical Leadership And Moral Reasoning: An Empirical Investigation

• Main Author: Daniels, Dianne M.
• Format: Others
• Published: NSUWorks 2009
• Subjects: Ethics; Kohlberg; Leadership; Moral Reasoning; Rest; Trevino; Business
• Online Access: http://nsuworks.nova.edu/hsbe_etd/25; http://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=hsbe_etd

The study of ethical behavior and moral reasoning is an important area of concentration in a period of changing technology and with the dynamics of globalization. Shareholder wealth, profitability, and organizational success have been linked to successful leadership. Corporate success can be found through strategies that capitalize on the opportunities globalization provides, and yet can be eroded by unethical behavior or poor moral decision-making. The primary purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between ethical leadership and levels of moral reasoning. Through the use of the Ethical Leadership Scale and the Managerial Moral Judgment Test, an empirical investigation of ethical leadership and moral reasoning is made. There is a very small element of literature on ethics that discusses leadership in the context of moral decision-making. There is little testing of ethical leadership as a construct (Brown, Trevino, & Harrison, 2005), and it generally is assumed in the literature that an ethical leader exhibits conventional or post-conventional levels of moral reasoning when faced with an ethical dilemma. This study finds the internal reliability of the Ethical Leadership Scale to be significant (r = 0.998). This research does not support the general assumption that ethical leaders exhibit conventional or post-conventional levels of moral reasoning. The Ethical Leader's age, gender, level of education, and amount of ethics training is not shown to be related to level of moral reasoning in this study.