Behavioral Integrity and Leadership Ethics in Organizations
This paper compares three empirical studies on organizational ethics and perceived behavioral integrity: Davis and Rothstein's (2006) meta-analysis linking managerial behavioral integrity to employee attitudes, Kottke and Pelletier's (2013) investigation into measuring perceptions of supervisor versus top-leader ethics, and Cohen et al.'s (2015) survey of healthcare employees using the VA IntegratedEthics Staff Survey. The paper identifies shared themes across the studies — including the influence of leadership ethics on follower behavior, the challenges of measuring ethical perception, and the value of meta-analysis for reconciling divergent methodologies. It also draws conclusions about future research directions, particularly regarding the mechanisms by which employees form ethical perceptions and what occurs when follower ethics diverge from leadership ethics.
- Overview of the Three Studies: Summaries of Davis, Kottke, and Cohen studies
- Similarities Across the Studies: Shared themes in organizational and leadership ethics
- The Role of Perception Measurement: Challenges and value of measuring ethical perception
- The Value of Meta-Analysis: How meta-analysis reconciles varied methodologies
- Conclusions and Future Research Directions: Takeaways and gaps for future ethics research
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What makes this paper effective
- Synthesizes three distinct studies across different organizational contexts (general business, healthcare) and methodologies, drawing meaningful comparisons rather than just summarizing each in isolation.
- Correctly identifies that the measurement papers (Kottke and Cohen) are precursors to the kind of meta-analysis Davis and Rothstein conducted, showing awareness of how research builds cumulatively in a field.
- Uses a concrete real-world example (WorldCom) to illustrate the theoretical point about what happens when follower ethics diverge from leadership ethics, grounding abstract analysis in evidence.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative literature analysis — examining multiple studies not just for their individual findings but for the relationships between them. The author identifies thematic convergences (leadership influence, perception measurement, meta-analytic value) while also pointing to gaps in the collective literature, which is the hallmark of a mature analytical review.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a summary of each study in turn, then pivots to a sustained "Similarities" section that identifies four shared themes running across all three. A concluding section synthesizes takeaways and proposes directions for future research. This compare-then-synthesize structure is well-suited to a multi-source comparative analysis at the undergraduate level.
Overview of the Three Studies
Davis and Rothstein (2006) conducted a meta-analysis examining the effects of perceived behavioral integrity of managers on employee behavior. Their analysis included only 12 studies — a small sample for a meta-analysis — illustrating that this is a thinly-studied subject. They found that across these studies there was a "strong positive overall relationship between the perceived behavioral integrity of managers and the employee attitudes of job satisfaction, organizational commitment, satisfaction with the leader and affect towards the organization" (p. 407). They also identified a couple of potential moderators for this relationship, including the gender of the employee and the distance between employee and leader in the organizational structure, and suggested that future studies could examine these moderators further.
Kottke and Pelletier (2013) examined how to measure the perceptions of supervisor and top-leader ethics in an organization. Their exploration sought to build on prior work by Pelletier using the Perceptions of Ethical Leadership Scale, differentiating between immediate supervisor and top leader in terms of how perceptions of their ethics are formed and measured. This study is important because followers have much closer connections with their immediate supervisor. They may perceive that person's ethical behavior quite differently — seeing them work every day — compared with the CEO, who may be very distant from everyday employees.
Cohen et al. (2015) conducted a survey of healthcare employees to rate the ethics of their organization. The authors used the IntegratedEthics Staff Survey, developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2014. This methodology was applied with Veterans' Health Administration employees to evaluate eight attributes of an ethical organization and how employees perceived those attributes within their own organization.
Similarities Across the Studies
There are several clear similarities among these three papers. First, all three address the general issue of organizational ethics — a broad subject with an extensive literature — each offering a different perspective on how that subject is interpreted within their respective industries. Organizational ethics often begin at the top of an organization, and the attitudes of those in leadership positions with respect to ethics typically influence the attitudes of those further down the organizational chart. This common upper-level theme binds the three papers even where their lower-level topics differ.
A second shared theme is the influence of leadership ethics on the ethics of followers. The Davis study makes this its focal point, but the other studies contribute to this theme as well. Davis and Rothstein conducted a meta-analysis of a dozen studies on this subject, aiming to establish the link between leadership ethics, how those ethics are perceived, and what influence those perceptions have on followers within an organization. The other two studies are more concerned with the measurement of perceptions, but both do so with the specific intent of providing a framework for understanding how perceptions of leadership ethics are formed. They are, in essence, laying groundwork for future studies — studies that would theoretically end up in a meta-analysis such as the one Davis and Rothstein conducted.
A final common theme concerns the types of measures being used. The Kottke and Cohen papers address this most directly, each working with a different methodology for measuring employee perceptions. The Kottke paper builds on the Perceptions of Ethical Leadership Scale developed by Pelletier, while the Cohen study used a scale specifically developed for the VA context. The absence of a single, common measurement method is not necessarily a drawback, but it does reflect the relatively nascent stage of this area of research and reinforces the argument that meta-analysis is important even when individual sample sizes are small.
References
Cohen, J. H., Foglia, M. B., Kivong, K., Pearlman, R., & Fox, E. (2015). How do healthcare employees rate the ethics of their organization? An analysis based on VA IntegratedEthics® Staff Survey data. Journal of Healthcare Management, 60(3), 169–185.
Davis, A. L., & Rothstein, H. R. (2006). The effects of the perceived behavioral integrity of managers on employee attitudes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Business Ethics, (4), 407.
Kennedy, K. (2012). An analysis of fraud: Causes, prevention and notable cases. Scholars' Repository.
Kottke, J., & Pelletier, K. (2013). Measuring and differentiating perceptions of supervisor and top leader ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 113(3), 415–428. doi:10.1007/s10551-012-1312-8
Tsai, Y. (2011). Relationship between organizational culture, leadership behavior and job satisfaction. BMC Health Services Research, 11, 98.
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