Attitude of Employees Towards Ethical Leadership

Abstract

Ethical Leadership can be defined as "the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and inter personal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two way communication, reinforcement and decision making".(Brown, Trevino & Harrison 2005) . The term ethical leadership tends to draw from the concepts of both ethical manager and ethical person. In Indian context we tend to believe that only an ethical person can he an ethical manager. But previous studies on ethical leadership have proved that the concepts of ethical person and ethical manager need not be related. Therefore, this study is in the direction to find out whether the employees in Indian IT and FMCG sector feel that their managers arc ethical at workplace and whether these managers are also ethical persons from the point of view of the employees. The study has been conducted in IT and FMCG industry by collecting the response of 205 respondents. The study has been based on both Ethical Leadership Scale (ELS) and the Corporate Culture Ethical Leadership Scale (CCELS) developed by Brown. The ELS consists of 10 items and CCELS consists of 20 items measured on 5 point Likert Scale ranging from strongly agree (5) to strongly disagree ( I). The score points were obtained by assigning 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 points respectively to SA, A, N, D, SD and by multiplying them by the relative frequency. The product was divided by total respondents. Thus, the average score was obtained. A highly acceptable item will get an average point of 5 and an unacceptable or least acceptable item will get an average point of 1. Further, correlation between ELS and CCELS was also studied. The study has revealed that there is a moderate level of correlation between ELS and CCELS. The findings of the study reveal that the Indian managers are less of a moral manager because they are more concerned about financial results of the organization rather than ethics. This was the opinion put forth by majority of the FMCG employees. But, the employees from the IT industry feel that their managers are