Michael B. Hargis

Ethical leadership, moral equity judgments, and discretionary workplace behavior

The current study examines the role of ethical cognition as a psychological mechanism linking ethical leadership to employee engagement in specific discretionary workplace behaviors. Hypotheses are developed proposing that ethical leadership is associated with employees’ negative moral equity judgments of workplace deviance (a discretionary antisocial behavior) and positive moral equity judgments of organizational citizenship (a discretionary prosocial behavior). In addition, hypotheses propose that moral equity judgments are a key type of ethical cognition linking ethical leadership with employee behaviors. Hypotheses are tested in a cross-organizational sample of 190 supervisor–employee dyads. Results indicate that employees who work for ethical leaders tended to judge acts of workplace deviance as morally inequitable and acts of organizational citizenship as morally equitable. In turn, these judgments guided employee regulation of behavior, and mediated the relationships between ethical leadership and employee avoidance of antisocial conduct and engagement in prosocial behavior.

Integrative Self-Knowledge Scale: Correlations and Incremental Validity of a Cross-Cultural Measure Developed in Iran and the United States

The authors used Iranian (N = 723) and American (N = 900) samples to develop an Integrative Self-Knowledge Scale for measuring a temporally integrated understanding of processes within the self. They administered this new instrument, the Mindfulness Scale (K. W. Brown & R. M. Ryan, 2003), the Reflective and Experiential Self-Knowledge Scales (N. Ghorbani, M. N. Bing, P. J. Watson, H. R. Davison, & D. L. Lebreton, 2003), and additional sample-specific measures to 3 separate groups of university students in each society. The Integrative Self-Knowledge Scale displayed internal reliability and measurement equivalence, along with convergent, criterion, discriminant, and incremental validity. This new instrument may be useful in promoting cross-cultural research in positive psychology.

Helping and harming others in the workplace: The roles of personal values and abusive supervision:

Drawing on models of competing values and self-verification theory, this article proposes that social dominance orientation (SDO) and psychological collectivism (PC) represent contrasting values that motivate opposing workplace interpersonal behaviors. SDO values are hypothesized to motivate interpersonal deviance and the avoidance of interpersonal citizenship as these behaviors verify social dominance as a guiding self-principle. PC values are hypothesized to motivate behaviors that verify collectivism as a guiding self-principle, including interpersonal citizenship and the avoidance of interpersonal deviance. Further, drawing on the values activation literature, abusive supervision is hypothesized to moderate the values-to-behavior relationships. In a cross-organizational sample of 490 working adults, SDO was positively related to interpersonal deviance and negatively related to interpersonal citizenship. Highly abusive supervision strengthened, whereas minimally abusive supervision weakened relationships with SDO. PC values were positively related to interpersonal citizenship, but were unrelated to interpersonal deviance and did not interact with abusive supervision.