Organisational Justice and Behavioural Ethics Research Group

A few months ago I visited Houston to attend the 2013 meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). During that conference I presented an empirical study on ethical leadership. My co-authors and I found that ethical leadership is negatively related to deviance among work teams. Conversely, it is positively related to voluntary learning activities. Speaking very loosely, the evidence is consistent with the notion that ethical leadership increases effective work behavior, while decreasing problematic deviance. This is a classic “win-win” solution to performance problems. Supervisors benefit from superior performance (very broadly defined), while subordinates are treated justly and decently. Everyone is better off, other things being equal. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

When I was assistant professor, I was in full possession of the three qualities that characterize young scholars – educational loans, modest pay, and summers off. As the second quality was barely sufficient to meet the demands of the first, I used the third to supplement my income. In practice, this meant that I was leading organizational development activities, such as team-building exercises and action planning workshops. After a time, these sessions became somewhat routine, and I began to notice commonalities in people’s comments. Among each group’s developmental needs was something to the effect of “people around here need to take more risks.” Usually, it was one of the first items on every list, typically articulated right after “we need better communication” but just before “we need to show each other more respect.” ↓ Read the rest of this entry…