The role of self-leadership in becoming an ethical leader in the South African work context

Abstract

Unethical behaviour has reached unacceptable levels in South Africa. Ethical leadership is an important source of ethical influence, and therefore provides an impetus for finding ways of managing ethics in an organisational context. Ethical leadership, however, is influenced and affected by self-leadership. The objective of this conceptual and theoretical research, therefore, was to indicate how self-leadership can contribute to leaders becoming ethical leaders within the current South African work context. The social learning theory can be made applicable to self-leadership and ethical leadership, and was used as the basis for this study. It is indicated that self-leadership strategies can have an effect on ethical behaviour of leaders.

Personal leadership as an antecedent of servant leadership amongst bank managers in South Africa

“…They also argue that an altruistic caring facet motivates spiritual leaders to exhibit genuine love, appreciation and understanding of others and to understand and guide their behaviours (Anderson & Sun, 2017). Moreover, other scholars argue that ethical leadership is regulated by PL (Van Zyl, 2014). They argue that PL via the personal influence processes could influence moral and ethical behaviours in their organisations.…”

“…They argue that PL via the personal influence processes could influence moral and ethical behaviours in their organisations. In such contexts, personal leaders may influence top-level management decisions and strategic processes of their organisations (Van Zyl, 2014), thus, enabling their organisations to behave ethically towards their communities (Gunnarsdottir, 2014;Shek et al, 2015). These extant literature arguments yield the following hypothesis:…”

“…Houghton and Neck (2002) found the nine sub-scales to be having acceptable levels of Cronbach's alpha coefficients. Different scholars found this measure to be valid within the South African context (Mahembe, Engelbrecht, & De Kock, 2013;Nel & Van Zyl, 2015;Van Zyl, 2014). A five-point Likert type rating scale, which ranges from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree ( 5) was used in this study.…”

Self-accountability in the Literature of Leadership

“…Enhancingself-leadership can be achieved via practicing self-leadership strategies including behaviorfocused, natural-reward, and constructive-thought (Manz, 1986;Van Zyl, 2014). These strategies help leaders standardize fluctuations of their feelings and behaviors in the workplace in order to accomplish desired goals (Zeijen et al, 2018).…”

“…Furthermore, leaders will be able to establish feelings of purpose about the compatibility between goals and naturally motivating tasks involving leaders' well-being and values (Manz, 2015;Zeijen et al, 2018). Constructive-thought strategies are grounded on the view that leaders can influence their thoughtsby thinking in constructive ways (Van Zyl, 2014). For example, replacing dysfunctional with more functional thoughts can promote self-efficacy, persistence, and challenging goals for a leader's self, which in turn can contribute to increased leadership effectiveness (Manz, 2015).…”