Emotional and ethical dimensions of leadership in three studies

¶ … role that ethical leadership plays in organizational effectiveness. Over the three papers, a number of different measures are examined. Sharif and Neubert did, anyway. The Rubin paper is about emotional recognition, so emotional intelligence, and its influence on "transformational leadership behavior," an equally vague notion.

One theme common to all three articles is leadership. There are differences in terms of how leadership is discussed. In two of the papers, the concept of ethical leadership is the independent variable, while in the Rubin paper leadership is the dependent variable, but all of the papers are about leadership.

A second theme that all studies deal with the emotional elements of leader-follower relations. The Rubin study is most direct in this respect, with emotion recognition as the independent variable. The other studies are less direct, looking at perceptions of ethical conduct. The key is that perceptions are inherently emotional responses to cues -- the followers do not know if the leader is ethical or not, but simply bases their perceptions on cues that they receive from the leader. The leader, conversely, can maintain the appearance of being ethical by either being ethical or by reading the emotions of the followers and doing things that employees will perceive as ethical. The emotion-mediated relationship between leader and follower is therefore worked into all three of these studies.

A third theme in these studies is that they each seek to tackle the less tangible aspects of leadership. All three draw on a fairly large body of literature where scholars have attempted to define and operationalize the sometimes complex, subtle nature of leadership. At least two of these papers have conceptual faults that perhaps illustrate how difficult it is to study leadership, especially in its emotional aspects. All leadership has some emotional element, inherently because of the key roles of leadership is to motivate, that is to spur an emotional response in followers. How leaders are perceived, how they read the emotional states of others, and how they influence those emotional states are key elements that distinguish leadership from management. Yet, these are difficult concepts with which to work. There are no clean ways to operationalize these soft skills, and there are a host of other variables that make it impossible to truly isolate these skills in the real world. Thus, the authors faced challenges in conducting their research, and these papers highlight how difficult it can be for people studying leadership to learn anything meaningful in such a context.

As for conclusions to be drawn from the three articles, there are two articles that study the same subject and one that does not. That the Rubin paper has leadership as dependent variable makes it distinct from the other two papers, which have ethical leadership as the independent variable. That difference alone means that there is no common theme between these three papers. They are not all studying things that leadership influence, nor are they all studying things that influence leadership. Conceptually, Rubin paper is very different from the other papers.

Taken together, the biggest takeaway is that leadership can be difficult to pin down. The Rubin paper is actually pretty good at operationalizing leadership elements. The other two papers are not as effective. For example, perceptions of ethics, as in Brown's 10-item measure used by Sharif, are used as a means of operationalizing ethics. But the two are not the same -- perceptions are distortions of reality and subject to interpretation, not to mention the fact that ethics are not concrete in and of themselves. The authors actually seem to have fairly thin grasp of the philosophical underpinnings of ethics -- they are trying to be scholarly about business ethics by only reading business ethics sources when they should have started at Aristotle. Similarly, involvement in change (in the Sharif paper) is seen as being related to ethics, and to transformational leadership; this is not necessarily the case. Any type of leader can communicate well with his or her subordinates; Sharif's logic rests on a no-true-Scotsman fallacy that "ethical leaders tend to plan organizational change before implementing it so that change is transparent." This is unfortunate, because lack of planning or foresight is not the same thing as a lack of ethics, but Sharif leans heavily on this error. Indeed, Sharif's work looks sloppy when juxtaposed against that of Neubert.

But that is rather the point. These are difficult concepts to pin down, being intangible, and subject to different interpretations. If two centuries of philosophical contemplation has not yielded certainty about what ethical behavior looks like, and that is just working within Western cultural context, how can a few decades of leadership study that cuts across all the world's major cultures come close to defining ethical leadership? Within the study there will be papers with sharper logic in how concepts are defined and operationalized, but this is imperfect science at best. The papers highlight how difficult it can be to use hard quantitative science techniques to study things that are inherently qualitative and fluid.

If there is a general trend in the two papers on ethical leadership it is that when workers perceive a leader to be more ethical they will respond better in general. Whether "ethical leadership" and "fairness" (as in Sharif) means distributive justice or procedural justice is not actually clarified, but even if it had been, the conclusion is that ethical leadership has a positive association with normative behavior within an organization. Part of ethics is the emotional side -- interpretations of fairness are usually emotional more than logical in the real world, so leaders with better emotional intelligence are more likely to be perceived as ethical. Then, they are more likely to be effective. What is missing from the three articles is that bridge between ethics and emotions. The interpretation that emotional intelligence can improve how a leader is perceived by followers is purely speculative, not covered in any of these three papers. But that bridge is necessary to link the papers, because of the differences in which variable leadership is.