A Study of the Relationship Between Moral Maturity and Respondent’s Self-Rated Leadership Style (original) (raw)

2013, Journal of Leadership Accountability and Ethics

The study of moral development and the effects it has on decision making have garnered a good deal of interest in the last thirty years. Rest, Thoma, and Narvaez (1999e) discuss the cognitive schemas associated with the different levels of moral development as stated by Kohlberg (1984). Rest et al. (1999e) suggest that cognitive moral schemas present in our conscious aid our retention of factual similarities between our experiences and ultimately aid in our decision making and search for further information. This implicit moral theory is similar to the leadership theory noted as Implicit Leadership Theory or the theory that one also carries in her or his memory a certain slate of factors which they use to identify a leader's behavior as being those of a good leader or an ineffective leader (Salter, Green, Ree, Carmody-Bubb, & Duncan, 2009). Maher (1991) found that a follower's recall of leadership information instructions is enhanced if the follower has correctly cognitively mapped or prototyped the leader's traits. Lord, Brown, and Freiberg (1999) state that even small portions of behavior, perhaps even single word communications, in the absence of further communication, might elicit from the follower a prototypical implicit based leadership style stored in memory. As stated by Eden and Leviathan (1975), leader behaviors guide memory of small tasks it is intuitive to surmise that a small prototypical behavior would guide a follower's assessment of a leader's leadership style. Keller (1992) stated that implicit leadership asks about the relationship between the evaluations and perceptions of leaders. Kark and Shamir (2002) asserted that transformational leaders have dual influence on followers. These authors state that transformational leaders' influence over the follower is derived by their ability to change the personal identity and the social identity of the follower through communication. The personal identity of the follower models the leader, and the social identity forms identification with the work unit. The authors go further to state that identities are formed by personality traits, quality of relationships, and group norms. Lord, et al. (1999) suggested that implicit leadership theories were a category system, which emphasized how prototypical behavior influenced the leadership perceptions and distortions in memory about leaders by perceivers.