Central in the issue-contingent model of Jones (1991) is the proposition that moral intensity of an issue itself has a significant effect on the individual’s ethical decision-making process. Brown and Treviño(2006) link the role of moral intensity to ethical leadership and the organizational ethical context. Taking these notions as starting point for our research, we propose that employee expectations of ethical leadership depend largely on moral task complexity (MTC). More specifically, we argue that public sector employees perform tasks that are more prone to increase the severity and frequency of the moral dilemmas they face and, as a result, moral task complexity will raise their perceived need for more proactive, explicit and values-based types of ethical leadership. We tested a comprehensive structural equation model using AMOS and standardized survey data from 355 working adults across public and private sector organizations in the Netherlands. Even after controlling for employees’ task significance, job autonomy, and hierarchical position in the organization, the public nature of employees’ tasks enhances the moral complexity of their work, which in turn, indeed raises their expectations of ethical leadership and affects their endorsement of pro-active ideal types of ethical leadership, i.e. ‘practicing preacher’ and ‘social builder’ (Heres, 2014; 2015). Our findings confirm the importance of issue-contingent ethical decision-making models for understanding ethical leadership dynamics and add important empirical insights that can help managers to align their ethical leadership to followers’ needs and preferences that vary along public and private sector organizations.
Keywords (5-10):
Ethical leadership, ethical decision-making, implicit leadership theories, Jones’ issue-contingent model, moral task complexity, structural work characteristics, work ethics, standardized survey, structural equation modeling, Q-methodology.
20180412_Paper_IRSPM_HeresLasthuizenHuberts.pdf 