Does Ethical Leadership Matter in Government? Effects on Organizational Commitment, Absenteeism, and Willingness to Report Ethical Problems

• Author: Gary Yukl,Bradley E. Wright,Shahidul Hassan
• Date: 01 May 2014
• Published date: 01 May 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12216

Shahidul Hassan is assistant professor

of public management in the John Glenn

School of Public Affairs at The Ohio State

University. His research focuses on how

leadership and managerial practices

in government organizations inf‌l uence

motivation, commitment, and performance

of employees.

E-mail: hassan.125@osu.edu

Bradley E. Wright is associate profes-

sor of public management and policy in

the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies

at Georgia State University. His research

focuses on how employee attitudes and

behavior are inf‌l uenced by the interaction

between characteristics of the employee

and the employee’s organizational work

environment.

E-mail: bwright32@gsu.edu

Gary Yukl is professor of management

at the University of Albany, State University

of New York. He is a fellow of the American

Psychological Association, the American

Psychological Society, the Society for

Industrial-Organizational Psychology, and

the Academy of Management. He has pub-

lished many articles in professional journals

and is author of several books, including

Leadership in Organizations (8th

ed., Prentice Hall, 2013). He has received

several awards for his research, including

two lifetime achievement awards: the 2007

Walter Ulmer Applied Research Award from

the Center for Creative Leadership and the

2011 Eminent Leadership Scholar Award

from the Academy of Management Network

of Leadership Scholars.

E-mail: g.yukl@albany.edu

Does Ethical Leadership Matter in Government? Effects on Organizational Commitment, Absenteeism, and Willingness to Report Ethical Problems 333

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 74, Iss. 3, pp. 333–343. © 2014 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12216.

Shahidul Hassan

The Ohio State University

Bradley E. Wright

Georgia State University

Gary Yukl

University at Albany

Recent ethical scandals involving managers in

government organizations have highlighted the need

for more research on ethical leadership in public sector

organizations. To assess the consequences of ethical leader-

ship, 161 managers in a large state government agency

and 415 of their direct reports were surveyed, and person-

nel records were obtained to measure absenteeism. Results

indicate that after controlling for the ef‌f ects of employee

characteristics, perceptions of procedural fairness, and

supportive leader behavior, ethical leadership reduced

absenteeism and had a positive inf‌l uence on organiza-

tional commitment and willingness to report ethical

problems. Implications of the f‌i ndings and suggestions for

future research are presented.

Public administration scholars have long dis-

cussed the importance of managerial ethics

from a normative perspective by specifying

what public managers should do or how they ought to

behave (Cooper 1982; Hart 1974, 1984; Rohr 1989).

Hart (1984), for example, proposed that public man-

agers should be prudent, trustworthy, and considerate,

and their actions should be consistent with public

values and interests. Given this emphasis on the moral

person, it is not surprising that

so many public sector organiza-

tions rely on their senior leader-

ship to establish and support

an ethical climate (Berman,

West, and Cava 1994; Bruce

1994; West and Berman 2004).

Empirical evidence also sup-

ports the importance of ethics

for good governance and democracy (Cowell, Downe,

and Morgan 2014) because it predicts satisfaction

with government services, trust in government, and

the amount of citizen participation (Vigoda-Gadot

2007; Villoria, Van Ryzin, and Lavena 2013).

In the United States, recent ethical scandals involv-

ing the targeting of conservative political groups for

scrutiny, violations of the privacy of journalists and

world leaders, and sexual harassment and assault

in the military reveal not only the importance of

ethical behavior but also the dif‌f‌i culty of ensuring it

(Alexander and Stewart 2013; Dinan 2013; Horwitz

2013; Shane 2013). In a 2007 national survey of

744 randomly selected government employees in the

United States (Ethics Resource Center 2008), 57 per-

cent of government employees reported that they had

witnessed a violation of ethical standards, policies, or

law in their workplace during the previous 12-month

period. While ethical violations can take many

dif‌f erent forms, commonly cited examples include

misreporting hours worked, employment discrimina-

tion, sexual harassment, and violations of privacy

(Ethics Resource Center 2008; Kaptein et al. 2005).

Of those who reported witnessing ethical violations,

nearly one-third (30 percent) of government employ-

ees in the United States did not report the violation

(Ethics Resource Center 2008). Just as troubling is the

opportunity and pressure for misconduct. Nearly half

(48 percent) of the government employees surveyed

reported experiencing situations that they felt invited

misconduct, while 14 percent reported that they had

been pressured to compromise ethical standards in

the course of performing their jobs. Existing evidence

also suggests that the leader-

ship in public organizations

often fails to achieve the desired

ethical standards. For example,

the 2012 Federal Employee

Viewpoint Survey found that

nearly half (45 percent) of

federal employees do not believe

the leaders in their organiza-

tion maintain high standards of honesty and integrity,

while well over one-third (38.5 percent) do not feel

that they can disclose a suspected violation of laws or

regulations without fear of reprisal (OPM 2012).

Given the importance and complexity of the topic,

there have been surprisingly few empirical studies

assessing the ef‌f ects of ethical leadership in govern-

ment organizations (Beeri et al. 2013; Hassan et al.

2013; Huberts, Kaptein, and Lasthuizen 2007;

Does Ethical Leadership Matter in Government?

Ef‌f ects on Organizational Commitment, Absenteeism,

and Willingness to Report Ethical Problems

Existing evidence also suggests

that the leadership in public

organizations often fails to

achieve the desired ethical

standards.