Ethical Leadership Perceptions: Does It Matter If You’re Black or White?

Dennis J. Marquardt (), Lee Warren Brown and Wendy J. Casper ()
Additional contact information
Dennis J. Marquardt: Abilene Christian University
Lee Warren Brown: Texas Woman’s University
Wendy J. Casper: The University of Texas at Arlington

Journal of Business Ethics, 2018, vol. 151, issue 3, No 1, 599-612

Abstract: Abstract Ethical scandals in business are all too common. Due to the increased public awareness of the transgressions of business executives and the potential costs associated with these transgressions, ethical leadership is among the top qualities sought by organizations as they hire and promote managers. This search for ethical leaders intersects with a labor force that is becoming more racially diverse than ever before. In this paper, we propose that the ethical leadership qualities of business leaders may be perceived differently depending upon the race of the leader. Using two experimental studies in the USA, we examine the difference in ethical leadership perceptions between a Black (White) hypocritical CEO and an ethical CEO (Study 1). Next, we consider a Black (White) ethically ambiguous CEO and an ethical CEO (Study 2). The findings indicate that a Black leader faces larger negative impact in hypocritical and ambiguous conditions than a similar White leader. There were no significant race effects in the ethical conditions in which a leader demonstrated a personal commitment to ethics through words or actions. We discuss the implications of these findings.

Keywords: Ethical leadership; Race; Diversity; Leadership categorization; Codes of ethics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-016-3250-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:151:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s10551-016-3250-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-016-3250-3

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().