Developing a Shared and Ethical Leadership Intervention for Between-Subject Experimental Designs

Abstract: Scholars and practitioners continue to seek more effective forms of leadership development to address today’s challenges (Ardichvili et al., 2016). Among these challenges, unethical leadership plagues our interpersonal relationships, organizational outcomes, and society (De Cremer & Moore, 2020; Treviño et al., 2006). Ergo, one criterion of effective leadership development might be a capacity for enhancing acceptable behaviors, standards, and performance. In addition to those (un)ethical challenges, the leadership development field remains overly constrained by its reliance on dated, hierarchical and/or traditional approaches to leadership. Such approaches focus on individual leaders rather than consider group development or collective-leadership capacities (Day et al., 2014). In contrast to traditional approaches, growing the group’s capacity to direct, align, and commit others characterizes collective leadership development—a phenomenon predicted to enhance overall leadership (Day & Dragoni, 2015). Thus, a second criterion for effective leadership development could be the inclusion of a collective, versus hierarchical, framework.
While not exclusive, shared and ethical leadership are two promising development areas uniquely capable of addressing the criteria above. Shared leadership, or the dynamic emergence of distributed leadership, has served as an effective intervention across collective networks (D’Innocenzo et al., 2016; Shuffler et al., 2018). Conversely, from the behavioral leadership discipline, ethical leadership is thought of as the promotion of appropriate conduct through personal example, relational reinforcement, and communication (Brown et al., 2005). This latter leadership is positively linked to outcomes such as ethical decisions, prosocial behavior, attitudes, and negatively to counterproductive behavior (Bedi et al., 2016; Ng & Feldman, 2015).
Notwithstanding those separate benefits from each of the respective ethical and shared approaches, the leadership development field pays too little attention to contexts that begin to concurrently integrate approaches. Or, in the rare cases when behavioral- and collective-leadership integrations have been attempted, they were criticized for mismatching theory, method, and analysis (D’Innocenzo et al., 2016; Kozlowski & Klein, 2000). In a “work-in-progress” series, the specific focus of this first study in the series is to develop and validate experimental procedures for shared and ethical leadership interventions (which future designs could then build from to study their combined effects together in a larger, nomological network of relationships).
Accordingly, a shared and ethical leadership development intervention was created within that project series as an experiment using a simulated team activity with a sample of 56, 5-person teams (n=280). The study used a 2 (ethical leadership training vs. control) x 2 (shared leadership training vs. control) between-subjects experimental design where the interventions were hypothesized to increase the emergence and presence of the two forms of leadership. Undergraduate participants at a large, Mid-Atlantic university were randomly assigned to conditions within class sections where they took part in a two-day, leadership-development program totaling four hours. To reduce potential error variance between groups, interventions (and controls) followed similar pre-recorded, video-based lessons.
All interventions were followed by a manipulation check comparing the means of how participants perceived the importance of the treatments in the various conditions (Antonakis et al., 2011). Instead of testing the combined effects (again, planned for future studies), an independent-sample t-test for this first study indicated that participants receiving the ethical leadership training both scored higher in understanding ethical leadership’s importance (ELtraining = 5.36, ELcontrol = 4.29) as well as demonstrated a significantly different mean score from those receiving the control training (i.e., participant-reported scores on ethical leadership training’s importance; t278 = 5.9, p = .00). Similarly, for the shared leadership conditions, the mean levels for those receiving the shared leadership training were higher (SLtraining = 5.52, SLcontrol = 4.54) and, also using an independent-sample t-test, the conditions’ mean differences were significant regarding perceptions of enhanced understanding for applying shared leadership (t275 = 5.79, p = .00).
This study provides validated manipulations in such leadership development contexts. Theoretically, this is the first known study to examine and demonstrate aforementioned manipulation effects. These favorable results provide preliminary encouragement towards continuing to examine a behavioral-collective-development nomology and consequences around such leadership. If future tests on the combined interactions result in significant effects (e.g., via ANOVAs), human developers, consultants, and instructors could better warrant a practical strategy, integrating both a value-based form of leadership (i.e., ethical leadership) together with collective leadership (i.e., a design that targets the enhancement of group processes and collaboration). Thus, by utilizing such value-based training contexts that also target the development of the group as a whole, practitioners could begin to unlock benefits of a collective leadership development that potentially surpass those of traditional, individual-based development.