In light of continuing corporate scandals, the study of ethical leadership remains an important area of research which helps to understand the antecedents and consequences of ethical behavior in organizations. The present study investigates how social distance influences ethical leadership evaluations, and how in turn ethical leadership evaluations affect leader-member exchange (LMX) after a leader's moral transgression. Based on construal level theory, we propose that higher social distance will lead to more severe evaluations of immoral behavior and therefore entail lower (...) ethical leadership ratings. Moreover, we hypothesize that ethical leadership will positively affect LMX. Participants read a scenario describing a moral situation in which a leader, who was presented in either high or low social distance, behaves unethically toward an employee. We tested our predictions using a structural equation modeling approach. As expected, participants in the high social distance condition judged leaders more harshly (i. e., they gave lower ethical leadership ratings) than in the low social distance condition. Thus, social distance moderated the extent to which leaders are perceived as ethical leaders after moral transgression. Moreover, in accordance with our proposition, ethical leadership ratings had a positive influence on LMX. (shrink)

The call for the emancipation of minds, a renunciation of stereotypes and routines, and an honest and critical analysis of the processes taking place in our society permeates all the documents of the Twenty-seventh Congress, the subsequent plenums of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and the speeches of the leaders of our Party and government. Today the Party is insistently demanding of philosophers and social scientists mat they step up their creative pursuit of theoretical developments and practical recommendations to (...) expand democratization and openness, and to reform and improve the mechanism of socialist self-government. (shrink)

The policy of genocide carried out by Armenian nationalists against Azerbaijanis has a history of more than 200 years. The goal of this insidious policy was the expulsion of Azerbaijani people from their historical lands and the creation of a mythical state of “Great Armenia” in these territories. On March 31, 1918, under the leadership of the Dashnaktsutyun party with the help of the Red Army of Soviet Russia, the Azerbaijani population of Baku was subjected to genocide. The corpses of (...) 57 Muslim women, whose ears and noses were cut off, and their bellies were torn open, were found in one of the neighborhoods in Baku. Armenians threw people alive into water wells, burning ovens, and oil wells, ripped apart pregnant women's bellies with bayonets, killed children with bayonets, nailed babies to walls, raped women, young girls, and old women. They hung men upside down by their legs, cut them in half with swords, crucified some of them on wooden beds, wrapped them in carpets and rugs and burned them alive, cut off people's hands and feet, and forced them to eat their own flesh under bayonets. Wild Armenian gangs burned Muslim clerics in the fire of bonfires lit from the Koran, the holy book of Islam. This was the true face of the Armenian nationalists who loudly shouted about “self-determination”, “autonomy” and “genocide”. The cruelty of Andranik, who made “necklaces” from children’s eyes, and other Armenians, knew no bounds. In March 1918, up to 20 thousand Azerbaijanians in Baku, and in 1917-1920 on the territory of Azerbaijan, more than 400 thousand Azerbaijani people were subjected to “genocide” by the Armenians. As the world ignores these atrocities, they are increasing. (shrink)

A prominent contribution of Soviet philosophy journals to the reform movement now under way in the USSR is the publication of articles analyzing the ills of present-day Soviet society. One of the more outspoken and probing of these critiques is that of the historian Andranik Migranian, published in Voprosy filosofii [Problems of Philosophy] in 1987 and translated as the opening article in this issue of Soviet Studies in Philosophy.