International Journal on Leadership

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Determinants and Outcomes of Ethical Leadership in Universities:A Scale Development


Affiliations
1 Department of Management, Central University of Rajasthan, Rajasthan, India
2 Department of Management, University of Rajasthan, Rajasthan, India
     

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Over recent years, ethical leadership has gained currency among scholars and practitioners, not only for its conceptual value but also for its practical value in enabling leaders to behave ethically. Ethical leadership refers to the leaders’ own value system, attitudes, decision-making and influence processes, and how these affect employee’s behavior. Conceptually ethical leadership can be understood as comprising value orientation, ethical attitudes and influence strategies of the leader as it has been discussed in an earlier research (Singh and Rathore, 2014). In organizational behaviour research, the outcomes of ethical leadership can be investigated at three levels, namely, the individual (micro), the work group (meso) and the organization (macro).

An instrument of ethical leadership would ideally be valuable in encouraging empirical research to understand better the importance of ethical leadership. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the development of a valid and reliable instrument measuring determinants and outcomes of ethical leadership in the context of universities in India. This research explains the process adopted to develop a valid and reliable instrument to access the perception of faculty members and administrative employees towards their immediate supervisors in universities. The procedures proposed by Trochim (2000) have been deployed to develop the scale used in the present research.

This paper is divided into four major sections: The first section of the study elaborates the process of item generation, generating 103 items from the literature and previous exploratory study (Singh and Rathore, 2014). In the second step, the items were put through expert testing using Likert scaling. For this purpose, 15 experts from the field of human resource management and organizational behaviour of different universities were contacted and asked their level of agreement for each item in the questionnaire. After this, the items were analyzed for corrected item-total correlations, upper-quartile and lower-quartile differences. This exercise enabled to reduce the number of items to 71. The final questionnaire thus prepared comprised 60 items to be measured on a five-point Likert scale. In the third part pilot-testing was conducted of a sample size of 50 respondents (faculty and administrative employees) of the Central University of Rajasthan, Ajmer, India selected through simple random sampling. Following this, discussion of results, managerial implications, limitations of the study and scope for future research are presented. The instrument so developed is found to have content validity and high reliability.

Keywords

Ethical Leadership, Ethics, Universities, Scale Development, Reliability.
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  • Determinants and Outcomes of Ethical Leadership in Universities:A Scale Development

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Authors

Nisha Rathore
Department of Management, Central University of Rajasthan, Rajasthan, India
Avantika Singh
Department of Management, University of Rajasthan, Rajasthan, India

Abstract


Over recent years, ethical leadership has gained currency among scholars and practitioners, not only for its conceptual value but also for its practical value in enabling leaders to behave ethically. Ethical leadership refers to the leaders’ own value system, attitudes, decision-making and influence processes, and how these affect employee’s behavior. Conceptually ethical leadership can be understood as comprising value orientation, ethical attitudes and influence strategies of the leader as it has been discussed in an earlier research (Singh and Rathore, 2014). In organizational behaviour research, the outcomes of ethical leadership can be investigated at three levels, namely, the individual (micro), the work group (meso) and the organization (macro).

An instrument of ethical leadership would ideally be valuable in encouraging empirical research to understand better the importance of ethical leadership. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the development of a valid and reliable instrument measuring determinants and outcomes of ethical leadership in the context of universities in India. This research explains the process adopted to develop a valid and reliable instrument to access the perception of faculty members and administrative employees towards their immediate supervisors in universities. The procedures proposed by Trochim (2000) have been deployed to develop the scale used in the present research.

This paper is divided into four major sections: The first section of the study elaborates the process of item generation, generating 103 items from the literature and previous exploratory study (Singh and Rathore, 2014). In the second step, the items were put through expert testing using Likert scaling. For this purpose, 15 experts from the field of human resource management and organizational behaviour of different universities were contacted and asked their level of agreement for each item in the questionnaire. After this, the items were analyzed for corrected item-total correlations, upper-quartile and lower-quartile differences. This exercise enabled to reduce the number of items to 71. The final questionnaire thus prepared comprised 60 items to be measured on a five-point Likert scale. In the third part pilot-testing was conducted of a sample size of 50 respondents (faculty and administrative employees) of the Central University of Rajasthan, Ajmer, India selected through simple random sampling. Following this, discussion of results, managerial implications, limitations of the study and scope for future research are presented. The instrument so developed is found to have content validity and high reliability.

Keywords


Ethical Leadership, Ethics, Universities, Scale Development, Reliability.

References