Research on Ethics and Integrity in Public Administration: Moving Forward, Looking Back

What Determines Ethical Behavior in Public Organizations: Is It Rules or Leadership?

“…Our objective in this article has been to examine how the activities of leaders intersected with the more formal, codified provisions of ethics regulation in promoting good conduct. In so doing, we have responded to the call from Hassan, Wright, and Yukl () for more research on the influence of specific leadership behaviors on the ethical conduct of subordinates and that of Menzel () to assess whether ethical codes make a difference. Building on the predominantly statistically based research on ethical leadership, our analysis used detailed qualitative analysis to trace the causal processes by which different elements of ethical leadership have an effect on conduct.…”

“…Much effort has also been applied to delineate the actions and behaviors that leaders can undertake to enhance ethics, including aspects of leadership style that create a culture in which good conduct is maintained (Huberts ; Lasthuizen ). Nevertheless, analysis of the impact of leadership and its role in fostering ethical behavior remains underdeveloped (Menzel ), especially in the public sector (Heres and Lasthuizen ; Van Wart 2003; Weinberg ), with insufficient testing of theory against empirical research compared with business ethics (Lawton and Doig ; Mayer et al ; Perry ; notable exceptions are Hassan ; Hassan, Wright, and Yukl ). Moreover, while it is widely recognized that leaders can exert influence through their character and personal conduct as well as by taking managerial actions to regulate the conduct of others (through issuing guidance or processes of sanctions and rewards), there is relatively little research that considers the causal relationships between leaders, systems of ethics regulation, and resulting standards of behavior.…”

“…The structure of local government also makes it insightful for understanding the contextual conditions in which ethical leadership unfolds. Much literature in this area assumes an undue homogeneity to “the organization” or “the leader” (Menzel ; Van Wart 2003). Leadership/integrity research has been “relatively narrow in scope” (Palanski and Yammarino , 171), often focusing on managers in public agencies (Hassan, Wright, and Yukl ; Lasthuizen ; Macaulay and Lawton ) in largely American organizations (Eisenbeiss and Brodbeck ) more than elected representatives (exceptions are De Vries 2002; Schumaker and Kelly ).…”

What Causes Unethical Behavior? A Meta‐Analysis to Set an Agenda for Public Administration Research

“…Despite the importance of ethics in government, which remains “at the heart of what we are about as a professional field” (Perry , 187), public administration research in this area has been scant (for a review, see Menzel ). Adams and Balfour's search for “scholarly articles on ethics topics in leading public administration journals indicates that, at their zenith in the last two decades of the twentieth century, ethics topics hovered around 5 percent of all articles.…”

“…The public administration research on ethics is characterized by a methodological delay relative to other fields. To the best of our knowledge, unlike the evidence available in public administration journals to date (for reviews, see Menzel ; Von Maravić ), it has become standard practice in other disciplines to investigate the causes of unethical behavior using randomized experiments (e.g., Moore and Gino ). Because the public administration literature on unethical behavior has relied almost exclusively on observational designs, our field still lacks a solid understanding of the causal mechanisms underlying unethical behavior in public organizations.…”