Approaching ethical leadership from a characterological perspective, this study reports on the creation of the Leadership Virtues Questionnaire (LVQ). Defining an ethical leader as one who adheres to the four cardinal virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice, as discussed in the ancient texts of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, we developed a rating instrument for assessing leader virtues. A series of studies with managers examined the psychometric properties and correlates of the LVQ. Factor analyses suggested that one factor best captured the construct, not inconsistent with philosophers' notions of the "unity" of the cardinal virtues. The LVQ was shown to be highly positively correlated with transformational leadership, authentic leadership, and another recently developed measure of ethical leadership, and there was evidence of discriminant validity. The LVQ, used with the virtues approach to ethical leadership, should prove to be a valuable tool for the assessment and development of leader virtues and ethics.

Over the past two decades, accumulating evidence has indicated that individuals experience challenge and hindrance stressors in qualitatively different ways, with the former being linked to more positive outcomes than the latter. Indeed, challenge stressors are believed to have net positive effects even though they can also lead to a range of strains, eliciting beliefs that managers can enhance performance outcomes by increasing the frequency of challenge stressors experienced in the workplace. The current article questions this conventional wisdom by developing theory that explains how different patterns of challenge stressor exposure influence employee outcomes. Across 2 field studies, our results supported our theory, indicating that when challenge stressors vary across time periods, they have negative indirect effects on employee performance and well-being outcomes. In contrast, when employees experience a stable pattern of challenge stressors across time periods, they have positive indirect effects on employee performance and well-being outcomes. These results, which suggest that the benefits of challenge stressors may not outweigh their costs when challenge stressors fluctuate, have important implications for theory and practice.

Given the amount of time and effort individuals pour into work, scholars and practitioners alike have spent considerable time and resources trying to understand well-being in the workplace. Unfortunately, much of the current research and measurement focuses on workplace well-being from only one perspective (i.e. hedonic well-being rather than eudaimonic well-being) or by generalizing between workplace well-being and general well-being. In this study, we sought to integrate the workplace context into the current eudaimonic perspective to develop an 8-item measure of eudaimonic workplace well-being. Using multi-wave data, we developed and validated a reliable, two-dimensional eudaimonic workplace well-being scale (EWWS). The measure replicated over seven samples and across 1346 participants and showed strong convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. Furthermore, we combined EWWS with an existing measure of hedonic workplace well-being and the resulting model of overall workplace well-being explained a significant amount of variance in key organizational constructs over and above existing hedonic well-being measures. Overall, the present study suggests that the EWWS is a valuable and valid measure and, when taken together with hedonic workplace well-being, captures what it means to have a holistic sense of well-being at work.

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