Ethical Leadership Literature Review

Critical Annotated Bibliography

Walumbwa, F. O., and Schaubroeck J. (2009). Leader Personality Traits Employee Voice Behavior: Mediating Roles of Ethical Leadership and Work Group Psychological Safety. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94 (5), 1275 – 1286.

In nutshell, the authors’ main aim of the research article was to examined the antecedents and the path forward of ethical leadership. Therein, they want to understand why there has been a positive and negative organizational process of ethical leadership. The authors came up with three points of terminology as a way to understand the ethical leadership. They term these as personality traits. These traits defined and are as follow:

a. Conscientiousness is related to high degree of moral obligation.

First one was the ethical leadership is positively related to voice behavior. Second was the positive relationship between ethical leadership and voice behavior is mediated by employees’ perceptions of psychological safety. Third point was leader agreeableness is positively related to ethical leadership. Meanwhile, the fourth point was talking about leader conscientiousness is positively related to ethical leadership. Also the fifth point discussed hypothesized leader neuroticism is negatively related to ethical leadership. Lastly, the authors reflected on the leader’s personality such as agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. They want to understand if these traits indirectly related to employee voice behavior through the mediating

Likewise, they purposed that agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism as personality antecedents of ethical leader behavior. However, there were few implications of findings for this study. One of those implications as revealed by authors was that organization can change employees’ personalities was very limited. The constraints of personalities may also limit the extent to which ethical leadership can be developed in organization through appropriate socialization and training. Moreover, the authors noticed some limitations during the research. They indicated that ethical leaders may be affected if they’re too closed to employees. Hence, there should be a gap between supervisors and subordinates. If the employees have close contact with ethical leadership, employees would explore the weakness of their leaders. This would positively bring discredit upon the supervisors. The authors narrated a little less about the cultural difference among communities in their study. Culture upbringing play integral parts on individuals’ lives. Therefore, I would like to see more research to be conducted on this subject where questions of culture and heritage is included in the