Lucas Monzani

Toward a Framework of Leader Character in Organizations

While the construct of character is well grounded in philosophy, ethics, and more recently psychology, it lags in acceptance and legitimacy within management research and mainstream practice. Our research seeks to remedy this through four contributions. First, we offer a framework of leader character that provides rigor through a three‐phase, multi‐method approach involving 1817 leaders, and relevance by using an engaged scholarship epistemology to validate the framework with practicing leaders. This framework highlights the theoretical underpinnings of the leader character model and articulates the character dimensions and elements that operate in concert to promote effective leadership. Second, we bring leader character into mainstream management research, extending the traditional competency and interpersonal focus on leadership to embrace the foundational component of leader character. In doing this, we articulate how leader character complements and strengthens several existing theories of leadership. Third, we extend the virtues‐based approach to ethical decision making to the broader domain of judgement and decision making in support of pursuing individual and organization effectiveness. Finally, we offer promising directions for future research on leader character that will also serve the larger domain of leadership research.

A reduced form of the Workplace Bullying Scale – the EAPA-T-R: A useful instrument for daily diary and experience sampling studies

ABSTRACT The need for more longitudinal studies (i.e. daily diary and experience sampling studies) focused on counterproductive work behaviours such as bullying requires shorter scales that at the same time do not compromise their content validity. Our main objective is to develop and validate a reduced version of the Workplace Bullying Scale (Escala de Abuso Psicológico Aplicado en el Lugar de Trabajo): the EAPA-T-R. Two studies (Study 1: 1506 and Study 2: 932 employees, respectively) were conducted to evaluate its psychometric properties and to ensure the external validity of the EAPA-T-R. Correlation and regression analyses were performed to reduce the current 12-item scale to a more parsimonious 4-item scale. Moreover, the psychometric properties of potential models were compared. Subsequently, the new scale was assessed using confirmatory factor analysis. Likewise, statistically significant relationships were found between the EAPA-T-R and other dimensions evaluated, such as job characteristics, transformational leadership, engagement, job satisfaction, and subjective performance. Moreover, bullying mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and burnout. To sum up, the EAPA-T-R showed good reliability and validity across studies, supporting its use in future research. The benefits of this short scale for daily diary and experience sampling studies and when using large surveys are discussed.

Identity leadership going global : validation of the Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI) across 20 Countries.

Recent theorizing applying the social identity approach to leadership proposes a four‐dimensional model of identity leadership that centres on leaders’ management of a shared sense of ‘we’ and ‘us’. This research validates a scale assessing this model – the Identity Leadership Inventory (ILI). We present results from an international project with data from all six continents and from more than 20 countries/regions with 5,290 participants. The ILI was translated (using back‐translation methods) into 13 different languages (available in the Appendix S1) and used along with measures of other leadership constructs (i.e., leader–member exchange [LMX], transformational leadership, and authentic leadership) as well as employee attitudes and (self‐reported) behaviours – namely identification, trust in the leader, job satisfaction, innovative work behaviour, organizational citizenship behaviour, and burnout. Results provide consistent support for the construct, discriminant, and criterion validity of the ILI across countries. We show that the four dimensions of identity leadership are distinguishable and that they relate to important work‐related attitudes and behaviours above and beyond other leadership constructs. Finally, we also validate a short form of the ILI, noting that is likely to have particular utility in applied contexts.

It takes two to tango: The interactive effect of authentic leadership and organizational identification on employee silence intentions

Organizational silence is a state of affairs in which employees refrain from voicing problematic issues at work. It often results from the dilemma between considering the short-term interests of the leader, who might perceive voicing problems as disloyal, and the long-term interests of the organization, which might suffer severe costs because of silence. In this article we propose a theoretical model that bridges authentic leadership and organizational identification to test their joint effect on organizational silence responses (exit, loyalty and neglect). Based on previous work, we hypothesized that authentic leadership is positively related to employees’ loyalty (a passive yet constructive response). However, in dilemmatic situations this effect should be buffered by a high organizational identification (as a result of conflicting loyalties). Similarly, in such situations, we predicted that the influence of authentic leadership on employees’ destructive responses may be counter-productive if not matched with a high organizational identification. We tested our proposed model with an online vignette study that involved 458 employees from German-speaking countries from diverse work sectors. We used a realistic scenario comprising a dilemmatic situation, in which a decision between voice and silence had to be made. Our results partially support the hypotheses. Implications for management and future research directions are discussed.

Correction: Anxiety and the severity of Tension-Type Headache mediate the relation between headache presenteeism and workers' productivity

The primary objective of this study was to explore the mechanisms and conditions whereby Tension-Type Headache (TTH) presenteeism relates to health-related loss of productivity as a result of both reduced physical and mental health. To this end, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to conduct a secondary data analysis of a randomized clinical trial involving 78 Tension-type Headache (TTH) patients. The results showed that TTH presenteeism did not directly relate to health-related loss of productivity, either due to physical, or mental health problems. However, through anxiety-state, TTH presenteeism decreased patients’ productivity, as consequence of reduced physical and mental health. Moreover, by increasing the severity of the Tension-Type Headache, TTH presenteeism indirectly decreased patients’ productivity as consequence of reduced physical health (but not mental health). Finally, our results show that such indirect effects only occur when the cause of TTH is non-mechanical (e.g., hormonal causes, etc.). Our work provides an integrative model that can inform organizational behaviorists and health professionals (e.g., physiotherapists). Implications for organizational health are discussed.

A Model for Positive Leadership in Argentinean Firms

For two hundred years, Argentina has been entrapped in a vicious cycle of economic collapse and recovery that prevented Argentinean firms from achieving sustainable growth. To understand this vicious cycle in more detail, this chapter unpacks the peculiarities of Argentinean leadership, describing its toxic nature. As main thesis, the author elaborates on how the corporate Machiavellianism of certain key actors in the Argentine economic and political context facilitated the emergence of pseudo-authentic and pseudo-transformational leaders and their colluding followers. As antithesis, the author proposes a model of positive leadership, tailored to the Argentinean context. The model uses identification as a key mechanism that binds authentic leadership, organisational identity, and broader organisational constructs such as climate, culture, and justice, into three spheres of virtue.