Understanding Ethical Leadership in High-publicness Organizations

EasyChair Preprint no. 1118

Abstract

Scholars have more recently integrated the generic ethical leadership concept to Public Administration and Management research (e.g. Kolthoff, Erakovich, and Lasthuizen, 2010; Hassan, 2015; Bellé and Cantarelli, 2017). However, whether this concept fully transfers to high-publicness organizations is rather empirically unclarified. Several scholars have emphasized that research on public leadership needs to pay more attention to publicness itself (Vogel and Masal, 2015; Tummers and Knies, 2016).

The aim of this study is, therefore, to investigate whether the generic ethical leadership concept transfers to high-publicness organizations. Based on 42 interviews with employees, frontline, middle, and top leaders at two Danish public hospitals, I compare the generic concept with empirical insights from the interviews in order to see whether the concept fits understandings in high publicness organizations.

The study shows that the generic concept only to some extent transfers to high publicness organizations, as the political level, the unlimited demands from citizens, and the dilemma-filled context seem to require some modifications of the concept. The insights from this study calls for more conceptual work on ethical leadership in Public Administration and Management research.

Keyphrases: Ethical Leadership, publicness, qualitative methods

@Booklet{EasyChair:1118,
  author = {Rebecca Risbjerg Nørgaard},
  title = {Understanding Ethical Leadership in High-publicness Organizations},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 1118},

  year = {EasyChair, 2019}}