engleski

Group-level outcomes of ethical leadership in health care teams

Ethical leaders encourage ethical behavior of their employees by communicating their standards and values and promoting them through the behaviors characterized by honesty, integrity, confidentiality and fairness. Previous studies in different organizational settings confirmed a positive relation of ethical leadership and perceived work efficiency, job satisfaction, prosocial behavior, organizational commitment and work motivation of employees. This study aims to test the effects of the congruence between management and employees evaluation of ethical leadership on teams’ work engagement, psychological empowerment and organizational citizenship behaviors. It includes assessment of ethical leadership of both team members and their supervisors in health care organizations. Results indicate that increasing congruence between the two sources of ethical leadership assessments enhances teams' work engagement, psychological empowerment and organizational citizenship behaviors. All these outcomes are at their highest level in a situation when the assessments of both, managers and the team members, are positive and aligned. If the manager’s self- ratings on a scale of ethical leadership are low, all the team-level outcomes are extremely low, regardless of the way the manager is seen by his/her subordinates. If the manager sees him/herself as ethical, but his/her team members do not share that opinion, all the outcomes are extremely low again. These results confirm that ethical leadership of health care teams enhances delivery and the quality of patient care. Practical implications of the study results are at least twofold. First, the benefits of raising the awareness of (un)ethical leadership consequences in health care settings are mentioned. Second, the need for conducting training programs to empower the health care managers for ethical leadership, as well as other human resource development activities which promote ethical competence in inter-professional collaborative health care teams, are discussed.

ethical leadership ; healthcare teams ; group-level outcomes

nije evidentirano