Values work Gehman, Joel; Treviño, Linda Klebe; Garud, Raghu
Academy of Management journal,
02/2013, Letnik:
56, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Existing cognitive and cultural perspectives on values have undertheorized the processes whereby values come to be practiced in organizations. We address this lacuna by studying the emergence and ...performance of what we call values practices. Drawing on an analysis of the development of an honor code within a large business school, we theorize the multiple kinds of values work involved in dealing with pockets of concern, knotting local concerns into action networks, performing values practices, and circulating values discourse. We conclude by discussing some opportunities and challenges that values work implies for future organizational scholarship.
This article examines the influence on organizational outcomes of CEOs' political ideology, specifically political conservatism vs. liberalism. We propose that CEOs' political ideologies will ...influence their firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices, hypothesizing that (1) liberal CEOs will emphasize CSR more than will conservative CEOs; (2) the association between a CEO's political ideology and CSR will be amplified by a CEO's relative power; and (3) liberal CEOs will emphasize CSR even when recent financial performance is low, whereas conservative CEOs will pursue CSR initiatives only as performance allows. We test our ideas with a sample of 249 CEOs, measuring their ideologies by coding their political donations over the ten years prior to their becoming CEOs. Results indicate that the political ideologies of CEOs are manifested in their firms' CSR profiles. Compared with conservative CEOs, liberal CEOs exhibit greater advances in CSR; the influence of CEOs' political liberalism on CSR is amplified when they have more power; and liberal CEOs' CSR initiatives are less contingent on recent performance than are those of conservative CEOs. In a corroborative exploration, we find that CEOs' political ideologies are significantly related to their corporate political action committee allocations, indicating that this largely unexplored executive attribute might be more widely consequential.
In this qualitative research, we enhance understanding of leader influences on employee voice perceptions by examining which leaders influence these perceptions and why these influences occur. We ...conducted 89 interviews in a high-tech multinational corporation with employees at multiple levels in two manufacturing and two R&D units that differed significantly on "speak up"-related items on a company-wide employee survey. Systematic analysis of the interview data led us to conclude that a broad spectrum of leaders from supervisors to senior managers influences individual employee voice perceptions in both direct and indirect ways. For example, informants referred to "skip-level leaders," those leaders two to five levels above themselves, as reasons to view voice as risky or futile nearly as often as they referred to immediate bosses. We present evidence related to "how" and "why" these patterns of influence occur by reviewing the direct and indirect modes of influence identified and by outlining the managerial functions that provide occasions for skip-level leaders to have direct influences on employee voice perceptions. We also point to differences in the specific echelons of leadership that were most influential across the units studied. We propose that multilevel, multileader influences on voice perceptions result naturally from modern workflows, the essential functions performed by skip-level leaders, and deep-seated employee attitudes about authority in hierarchical organizations. We propose further that differences in which levels of skip-level leadership are most critical to employee voice perceptions in different units depend on which leaders have the power to handle strategic contingencies and to resolve key uncertainties within particular work environments. Finally, we delve into the theoretical implications of our findings to offer a set of research propositions that can be tested in future research. Collectively, our findings point to a complex and nuanced picture of multilevel leader influences on employee voice perceptions with important practical implications for management.
Thus far, we know much more about the significant outcomes of perceived ethical leadership than we do about its antecedents. In this study, we focus on multiple types of ethical role models as ...antecedents of perceived ethical leadership. According to social learning theory, role models facilitate the acquisition of moral and other types of behavior. Yet, we do not know whether having had ethical role models influences follower perceptions of one's ethical leadership and, if so, what kinds of role models are important. We conducted a field study, surveying supervisors and their subordinates to examine the relationship between three types of ethical role models and ethical leadership: the leader's childhood role models, career mentors, and top managers. We found that having had an ethical role model during the leader's career was positively related to subordinate-rated ethical leadership. As expected, this effect was moderated by leader age, such that the relationship between career mentoring and ethical leadership was stronger for older leaders. Leader age also moderated the relationship between childhood models and ethical leadership ratings, such that having had childhood ethical role models was more strongly and positively related to ethical leadership for younger leaders. We found no effect for top management ethical role models. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Despite the importance of ethical voice for advancing ethics in organizations, we know little about how coworkers respond to ethical voice in their work units. Drawing on the fundamental ...approach/avoidance behavioral system and the promotive and prohibitive distinction in the voice literature, we distinguish between promotive and prohibitive ethical voice and propose that they engender different emotions-elevation (an approach-oriented moral emotion) and feelings of threat (an avoidance-oriented emotion), respectively, in coworkers. We propose that these emotions differentially influence coworker subsequent responses to the ethical voice behavior. In a time-lagged critical incident survey and two experimental studies, we consistently found support for our hypothesis that promotive ethical voice elicits moral elevation in coworkers with subsequent coworker verbal support for the ethical voice (an approach-oriented response). However, results for prohibitive ethical voice were more complex because prohibitive ethical voice leads to mixed emotions in coworkers. It sometimes leads to feelings of threat, with indirect negative effects via threat on coworker support. But surprisingly, it also leads to coworker elevation and hence can have positive indirect effects via elevation on coworker support. We will discuss the research and practical implications of these findings.
Cheating in College McCabe, Donald L; Treviño, Linda K; Butterfield, Kenneth D
2012, 2012-11-01
eBook
Today’s students are tomorrow’s leaders, and the college years are a critical period for their ethical development. Cheating in College explores how and why students cheat and what policies, ...practices, and participation may be useful in promoting academic integrity and reducing cheating.
The authors investigate trends over time, including internet-based cheating. They consider personal and situational reasons and the culture of groups where dishonesty is more common (such as business majors) and social settings that support cheating (such as fraternities and sororities).
Faculty and administrators are increasing their efforts to promote academic honesty among students. Orientation and training sessions, information on college and university websites, chapters in student handbooks that describe codes of conduct, honor codes, and course syllabi all define cheating and establish the consequences.
Based on the authors’ multiyear, multisite surveys, Cheating in College quantifies and analyzes student cheating to demonstrate why academic integrity is important and the cultural efforts that are effective in restoring it.
In the expanding field of ethical leadership research, little attention has been paid to the association between ethical leaders’ ethical characteristics (beyond personality) and perceived ethical ...leadership, and, more importantly, the potential influence of ethical leadership on followers’ ethical characteristics. In this study, we tested a theoretical model based upon social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986) to examine leaders’ moral identity and moral attentiveness as antecedents of perceived ethical leadership, and follower moral identity and moral attentiveness as outcomes of ethical leadership. Based upon data from 89 leaders and 460 followers in China, collected at two points in time, we found that leaders’ moral identity and moral attentiveness are associated with follower’s perceptions of ethical leadership. Ethical leadership is, in turn, associated with their followers’ moral identity and moral attentiveness. We found furthermore that ethical leadership mediates the effect of leaders’ moral identity on followers’ moral identity, but not the effect of leaders’ moral attentiveness on followers’ moral attentiveness. We discuss the findings, theoretical contributions, practical implications, and future research.
The importance of ethical behavior to an organization has never been more apparent, and in recent years researchers have generated a great deal of knowledge about the management of individual ethical ...behavior in organizations. We review this literature and attempt to provide a coherent portrait of the current state of the field. We discuss individual, group, and organizational influences and consider gaps in current knowledge and obstacles that limit our understanding. We conclude by offering directions for future research on behavioral ethics in organizations.
Someone to Look Up To Jordan, Jennifer; Brown, Michael E.; Treviño, Linda K. ...
Journal of management,
03/2013, Letnik:
39, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Despite a business environment that highlights the importance of executives’ ethical leadership, the individual antecedents of ethical leadership remain largely unknown. In this study, the authors ...propose that follower perceptions of ethical leadership depend on the executive leader’s cognitive moral development (CMD) and, more importantly, on the relationship between executive leader and follower CMD. In a sample of 143 leader–follower dyads, the authors find a direct positive relationship between leader CMD and perceptions of ethical leadership. Using polynomial regression, they find that ethical leadership is maximized when the leader’s CMD diverges from and is greater than the follower’s CMD. The authors explain these findings using a social learning theory framework. Leaders who are more advanced ethical reasoners relative to their followers are likely to stand out as salient ethical role models whose ethics-related communication and behavior attract followers’ attention. The authors discuss the research and practical implications of these findings.
We develop and test a model linking ethical leadership with unit ethical culture, both across and within organizational levels, examining how both leadership and culture relate to ethical cognitions ...and behaviors of lower-level followers. The data were collected from 2,572 U.S. Army soldiers representing three organizational levels deployed in combat. Findings provide limited support for simple trickle-down mechanisms of ethical leadership but broader support for a multilevel model that takes into account how leaders embed shared understandings through their influence on the ethical culture of units at various levels, which in turn influence followers' ethical cognitions and behavior. The influences of ethical leadership occur not only directly, among immediate followers within a unit, but also indirectly, across hierarchical levels, through the cascading of ethical culture and senior leaders' influences on subordinate leader behavior. We discuss scholarly and practical implications for understanding how leaders transmit ethical influence both down and across large organizations.
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