Abstract
Scholars have suggested that leaders’ ethical failures at the beginning of the twenty-first century have raised awareness about the importance of ethical leadership (EL). Yet, there has been no systematic effort to evaluate whether this awareness indeed led to changes in EL or how followers react to this leadership style over time. To address this gap, we examine the evolution in EL means, variability, and its associations with follower outcomes between 2004 and 2019. Our cross-temporal meta-analysis included 359 independent samples from 314 studies published between 2005 and 2020 and focused on followers’ ratings of their leaders using the Ethical Leadership Scale (ELS; Brown et al., in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117–134, 2005). Using cubic spline meta-regressions, our results indicated no global changes in EL mean levels and variability across the 15-year period. Nevertheless, country-level comparisons revealed different EL-trends in China (i.e. decrease) versus the United States (i.e. stable), and further moderation analyses highlighted the role of cultural value dimensions and national corruption rates. Finally, we also found that the relationship between EL and desirable follower outcomes (e.g. organizational citizenship behavior) became gradually stronger over time on a global level. These results provide a solid empirical basis to evaluate cross-temporal trends in EL and its (changing) impact on follower outcomes across the globe.
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The dataset and code used to perform analyses are available at the Open Science Framework (OSF) repository under the following link: https://osf.io/j7fbu/.
Notes
We also identified several studies which have already been criticized (and some of them retracted) due to erroneous statistical results and inability to provide raw data (https://retractionwatch.com/category/by-author/walumbwa/). Checking for retractions and expressions of concern (using https://pubpeer.com/) led to an additional exclusion of five papers.
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Justine Amory and Bart Wille contributed to the study conception and design. Justine Amory screened and coded the articles. Brenton Wiernik performed the analyses and wrote the method section. Justine Amory wrote the first draft of the manuscript and Bart Wille and Sofie Dupré commented on previous versions. Sofie Dupré took the lead in the final revision of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Brenton Wiernik is currently an independent researcher and Research Scientist at Meta, Demography and Survey Science. The current research was conducted while he was at the University of South Florida.
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Amory, J., Wille, B., Wiernik, B.M. et al. Ethical Leadership on the Rise? A Cross-Temporal and Cross-Cultural Meta-Analysis of its Means, Variability, and Relationships with Follower Outcomes Across 15 Years. J Bus Ethics (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05632-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05632-z