Leader Integrity and Employee Outcomes: Where Do They Collide?
This study samples 270 employees from Ghana’s Civil Service to examine their perception of their leaders and the relative influence this leadership attribute has on their citizenship and unproductive behaviours at the workplace. The study finds that leade
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Abstract This study samples 270 employees from Ghana’s Civil Service to examine their perception of their leaders and the relative influence this leadership attribute has on their citizenship and unproductive behaviours at the workplace. The study finds that leader integrity is strongly related to the OCB of followers but has no significant relationship with their deviant behaviours. The study thus recommends that managers be mindful to demonstrate integrity in the search for positive employee outcomes. This study is the first to examine the relationship between these variables in an African context.
Keywords Leader Integrity Civil service Citizenship behaviour Employee outcome
Counterproductive behaviour
1 Introduction The focus on examining leadership from the perspective of the various styles and models of leadership behaviour [2] is shifting in recent times to an assessment of positive leadership behaviours that culminates in positive employee outcomes [15, 31]. This is because leadership which unarguably has been attributed as the prime determinant of organizational success has been cited amongst various incidents of corporate and government scandals [12, 30]. The growing trend of organizational failures as a result of leadership character flaws has led to increasing calls for more positive leadership behaviours in both management literature and practice such as leader integrity. Complimentarily, the past few years has witnessed leadership studies linking character strengths of leaders, specifically leader integrity, with positive organizational outcomes [15, 24, 31, 33]. Nonetheless, as much as the search for more K. Dartey-Baah (&) R. Arthur Department of Organisation and Human Resource Management, University of Ghana Business School, P.O. Box LG 78, Legon, Accra, Ghana e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 J.I. Kantola et al. (eds.), Advances in Human Factors, Business Management, Training and Education, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 498, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42070-7_10
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positive leadership characters abound and studies that seek to link leader integrity and organizational outcomes continue to dominate recent leadership studies, there appears to be lack of empirical studies that establish the relationship between leader integrity and voluntary employee behaviours, particularly, organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) and counterproductive work behaviours (CWB) (for an exception, see Zhang et al. [33]. The study of Zhang and his friends [33] investigated how leader integrity influences the citizenship behaviour of subordinates mediating the relationship with leader effectiveness. Though their study provided some profound findings about the relationship between the two concepts (leader integrity and OCB), the study only focused on an aspect of voluntary behaviour, that is OCB, neglecting how leader integrity could also influence CWB, which extant literature has shown is not necessarily a negat
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