Virtuous Leaders: Assessing Character Strengths in the Workplace

Abstract

Three studies were conducted to build, test, and compare a model of character-based leadership. The first qualitative study used the critical incident technique (Flanagan, 1949) and Peterson and Seligman's (2004) comprehensive theoretical framework of character strengths to develop and construct a scale. The second study tested the scale's psychometric properties. Exploratory factor analysis indicated that character-based leadership is a three-dimensional construct and demonstrates adequate content validity. The third study tested the new scale against organizational and personal outcome measures. The resulting structural model provided a strong fit. Relationships emerged between leader wisdom and employee affective commitment, leader humanity and employee wellbeing, employee organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs), employee cognitive trust, and employee affective trust, and between leader temperance and employee trust.

Conceptualization and Measurement of Virtuous Leadership: Doing Well by Doing Good

“…Finally, the Character Strengths in Leadership Scale (CSLS) developed by Thun and Kelloway (2011) is also somewhat consistent with Hackett and Wang's (2012) approach.…”

“…Empirically, the positive effects of inspirational motivation, perceptions of organizational support, and trust in the leader, on in-role and extra-role follower performance, are well documented (Bass, 1985;Dirks and Ferrin, 2002). More directly, the practice of virtues by leaders (e.g., integrity and humanity) associates positively with follower inrole (Hannah et al, 2005) and extra-role (Palanski and Yammarino, 2009;Thun and Kelloway, 2011) performance.…”

“…In all, there is substantial construct variation within the realm of valueladen leadership. With the exception of Riggio et al (2010) and Thun and Kelloway (2011), very little has been done to target the set of cardinal virtues of interest to us.…”

“…Riggio et al, 2010) reflects a single factor and the CSLS (cf. Thun and Kelloway, 2011) reflects three dimensions. Finally, Table 3 shows Cronbach alphas ranging from .84 to .96, reflecting good internal consistency reliability for each of the virtues and for the VLQ overall.…”

“…Over time, a rich systematic discussion of virtues has developed concerning the nature of virtue, how it is acquired and developed, and how it influences behavior. Nonetheless, only recently has virtues ethics begun to figure prominently in leadership research in the organizational and behavioral sciences (Flynn, 2008;Juurikkala, 2012;Manz et al, 2008;Neubert, 2011;Riggio et al, 2010;Sosik and Cameron, 2010;Sosik et al, 2012;Thun and Kelloway, 2011) as part of a framework used to understand business ethics (Crossan et al, 2013;Flynn, 2008;Palanski and Yammarino, 2009). Unfortunately, as Hackett and Wang (2012) document, much of this scholarship is not well grounded in virtue ethics which has contributed to a lack of consensus concerning the core defining elements of virtuous leadership and their measurement.…”