Quantitative Article
Nowadays companies are spending a lot of efforts and money
to demonstrate themselves as ethical and socially responsible organizations in
the eyes of their customers and suppliers. After the bankruptcy of Enron,
Lehman Brothers and failure of other organizations, people have started
emphasizing the concept of ethical leadership. Ethical leadership enables the
employees to engage in good practices which overall result in welfare of
everyone in the society. Management's tone has a trickle-down effect on
employees. If top managers encourage ethics and integrity so will employees. "But if upper management not cares about ethics and focuses solely on the bottom
line, employees will be more prone to commit fraud and feel that ethical
conduct isn't a priority".
Due to the importance of ethical leadership, the ethical
approach adopted by the leaders has aroused attention in inter-organizational
leadership research. Existing ethical leadership literature is exclusively
based on the western culture context. The ideas may not suitable to other
societal contexts, especially in Chinese business culture. Thus, this article
proposes that the ethical leadership concept is especially crucial in the
Chinese business culture. Even through this issue has been discussed by other authors;
there is little published empirical evidence to evaluate these perceptions. So
the authors wrote this article to respond this need.
The type of this research is hypothesis testing. The authors
suggested two hypothesizes. The first one is "higher ethical leadership is
associated with lower inter-organizational conflict, whether task or
relationship". Another is task interdependence moderates the relationship of
ethical leadership and inter-organizational. The research collected the data
from external suppliers of large listed group company in China and then test
the data collected. The results show that the more ethics related efforts the
leader demonstrates, the better the understanding and relationship with the
other partner could be created, and consequently the less conflict will exist
in the inter-organizational cooperating process.
The first of good ethical leadership can improve
competitiveness in inter-organizational collaboration. Leaders can effectively
facilitate collaboration with external buyers or suppliers, because external
stakeholders will adjust their behavior and decision-making in according with
the common ethical values and images set by leaders. Another implication is
that firms should pay more attention to ethical leadership in interacting with
interdependent partners.
Resource:
1.
“How Do Chinese Firms Deal with Inter-Organizational Conflict?” http://libproxy.uhcl.edu:2057/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=0e133ee1-94a0-47f8-8258-bf50acd4049f%40sessionmgr13&vid=4&hid=12
2.
“Why Is Ethical Leadership So Important?”
3.
“Tone at the top”:
4.
“Ethical leadership”
I think the article is quite interesting, especially with the growing concerns of China’s influence with the global economic crisis. Ethical leadership is extremely important and can definitely improve competitiveness in inter-organizational collaboration. And if you look around you can definitely find that most company leaders are nice-decent people, practice good principles and always have good intentions especially for their company. But sometimes it is very important to closely inspect what it really means to lead with ethics.
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