What's the Difference? Ethical Leadership in Public, Hybrid and Private Sector Organizations
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Abstract Is there one best practice for ethical leadership? Studies suggest that the publicness of an organization can have important implications for leadership. Yet research on ethical leadership generally assumes that one ethical leadership style should fit all types of organization alike. This study explores the validity of that assumption by using qualitative interviews to unravel similarities and differences in how Dutch public, hybrid and private sector managers conceive ethical leadership. The results suggest that most aspects of ethical leadership may be transferable across public and private sectors. However, in comparison with their private sector counterparts, the managers operating in public and hybrid sector organizations placed greater value on being altruistic, showing concern for the common good, and being responsive, transparent and accountable to society at large. Moreover, whereas public and hybrid sector managers considered explicit and frequent communication about ethics to be a key component of ethical leadership, most of the private sector managers preferred communication strategies in which ethics was more implicitly embedded in discussions of, for instance, 'the business model' or 'customer relationships'. The results suggest further research on the contingencies of ethical leadership views and practices across different types of organizations is warranted. Keywords: Ethical leadershippublicnessorganization typecontextvariform universal leadership Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the guest editors and the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. We would also like to thank Lieke Witlox and Gareth Hewer for their assistance and technical support. Notes To illustrate, 'public organizations' refers to organizations such as ministries and municipalities, which are predominantly public on all three dimensions: they are under substantial and direct political control, primarily depend on public funding, and perform public tasks. By contrast, private organizations are predominantly private on the same three dimensions and involve organizations such as retailers and engineering companies. In such organizations, political control is limited, funding is predominantly or fully private, and the primary aim is to reach private goals (most notably, to make profit). Hybrid organizations then concern organizations where the degree of publicness of the organization differs according to the three dimensions. For instance, in the case of Dutch universities, where political control is moderate, funding is increasingly becoming a mix of private and public sources, but the primary aim is still to provide a public service. A more extensive report and discussion of the results of this study can be found in Heres Citation(2010).Keywords:
Ethical Leadership
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