The Influence Of Ethical Leadership On Organizational Ethics

In recent years, business scandals have occurred frequently, making the corporate ethics become the focus of the society. Leadership research is beginning to emphasize on the ethical aspect of leadership, rather than only economic effiency aspect."Ethical leadership" emerges as a critical concept to understand the construction of organizational ethics. Ethical leaders play a key role in the construction of ethical climate. Though the conceptualization of ethical leadership has been accepted by many scholars, the underpinning mechanisms remain no consistent interpretation. This thesis aims to reveal the specific mechanisms of how ethical leaders build the organizational ethical climate within China context. Three basic mechanisms can be extracted from the extant literature. First, ethical leaders transmit the ethical values to organization members by communicating with them, trying to create resonance of ethical values within the organizations; Second, ethical leaders behave as ethical role models to guide the organization members to act in ethical ways in the day-to-day work, so as to create organizational ethical climate. Third, ethical leaders set up ethical institutions by integrating ethical principles into institution building. Then, they can constrain and enable the appropriate actions by implementing these ethical institutions. On the basis of analysis above, this thesis proposes a trickle-down model to portray how ethical leaders construct organizational ethical climate.The thesis adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods. We developed the research questionnaire draft based on the deep interviews with22staff of the three companies. The questionnaire draft was pre-tested grounded on the112staff of the five companies. After adjustment and amendment according to the data, the final research questionnaire of high reliability and validity was accepted. To improve data quality and ensure the authenticity, all questionnaires were issued by the paper version.320questionnaires were distributed to the staff of the32enterprises and246were returned. The SPSS19.0statistical data software was used to conduct data analysis, such as reliability testing, factor analysis, Pearson correlation analysis, and regression analysis and so on. The results were as follows:first, ethical leadership generates a positive effect on organizational ethical climate; second, ethical leaders can construct the organizational ethical climate by establishing and shaping ethical role models; third, ethical leaders can construct the organizational ethical climate through building and implementing ethical institutions; forth, ethical values is not significant in the relationship between ethical leadership and organizational ethical climate. The possible causes of these four main results were analyzed.This thesis reveals the fundamental mechanisms of how corporate ethical leadership influence organizational ethical climate, from the perspective of staff perception, within the market environment in China, deepening the understanding of the role of Chinese corporate leaders in the construction of corporate ethics. Finally, the limits of this research and the directions for future research are discussed.