Linking authentic leadership, moral voice and silence—A serial mediation model comprising follower constructive cognition and moral efficacy

Authentic leadership is widely considered a positive form of moral leadership that emphasizes a leader’s self-awareness, self-concordance, and modeling of self-regulatory behaviors. It is expected that authentic leaders foster moral employee behavior. However, empirical evidence for this assumption with a clear focus on the moral domain is still rather scarce. Furthermore, little is known about mediating mechanisms, especially pertaining to self-regulation of followers. Our research focused on two important facets of moral employee behavior: voice and silence. We (a) examined relationships between authentic leadership, moral voice, and two major forms of moral silence (quiescent and acquiescent) and (b) tested follower constructive cognition and moral efficacy as self-regulatory mechanisms in a serial mediation model. We conducted a cross-sectional study with employees from different organizations ( n = 295). As expected, analyses indicated that authentic leadership is positively related to self-reported voice and negatively to self-reported silence on moral issues. Pertaining to the outcomes quiescent moral silence and moral voice, results revealed a serial mediation effect via constructive cognition and moral efficacy. Furthermore, unique indirect effects of each mediator were found. Thus, authentic leadership can enhance moral behavior mediated by follower constructive cognition and moral efficacy. Based on these insights, new interventions for overcoming silence and promoting voice in organizations can be designed.

In A Mindful Moral Voice: Mindful Compassion, The Ethic of Care and Education

This paper argues that Carol Gilligan’s Ethic of Care has strong affinities with the Buddhist concept of karuna (compassion) which, Jay Garfield has argued, is the necessary foundation of rights theory. Its central argument is that both moral compassion and thus rights theory are grounded in the natural compassionate care a mother exercises in order to promote the flourishing of her child without which children, and consequently adult society, would not survive in any form. Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games is brought to bear on Buddhist philosophy to foreground the rootedness of human experience in connection and empathy. This further supports the naturalness of compassionate care, the Ethic of Care and karuna. Finally, mindfulness meditation is proposed as a practice appropriate for the educational context for the development of karuna as a moral resource for personal, civil and professional life.

Russian Orthodox Clergy and Laity Challenging Institutional Religious Authority Online: The Case of Ahilla.ru

With the rise of new computer technologies, scholars of religion and media came to raise questions of how digital communication affects institutional forms of authority. In the digital realm, a number of alternative platforms emerged that empower religious communities to partake in the production of religious narratives outside organized religion. Ahilla.ru is a recent example of such an alternative place facilitated by digital technology. Founded by a former Russian Orthodox priest in February 2017, the website is a response to the politics and official rhetoric of Orthodox Church hierarchs who appeared ever more comfortable in conflating religion and politics and presenting themselves as the moral voice of the nation. Since his enthronement in 2009, Patriarch Kirill has centralized and hierarchized the Church, widening the gap between the episcopate and the low-level clergy and laity. Criticism of institutional religious authority that provides space for the articulation of alternative views of Orthodox faith and identity is at the core of Ahilla.ru. Ahilla.ru merits special attention, as it emerged not outside but within the Russian Orthodox Church and poses a challenge, via digital media space, to the dominant discourse articulated by Orthodox Church authorities and Russian mainstream media. This article seeks to answer the question of how online communication enhances media non-professionals to reflect upon their experiences within institutional religious settings and makes these experiences—previously unmediated and unknown—part of the media discourse.

Conscience as an Experiment: The Russian Subtext of John Galsworthy’s Short Story “Conscience”

John Galsworthy, as it is quite widely known, was strongly influenced by Russian literature. What is much less known, or even realized, is that this influence had at least two major lines: (1) a literary line, connected with a vivid perception of style, plot, other aesthetic and ideological discoveries of Russian novelists, and (2) a cultural line that carried Galsworthy to philosophizing on such problems as national character, national culture, and the historical development of the European civilization. In this second respect, Chekhov can be considered the central figure for the English writer. This supposition is based on some Galsworthy’s essays in which Chekhov’s name is directly connected with the idea of “Russianness”, with such typical, according to the English writer’s point of view, Russian traits as “a passionate search for truth”, emotionality, self-knowledge, and self-declaration. Thus, these were, primarily, Chekhov’s works that served for Galsworthy as the basis for his very special—both aesthetic and ideological—experiment. Galsworthy conducted this experiment in his short story under a “Russian”, if not “Chekhovian”, title “Conscience” (cf., Chekhov’s short story “Bezzakonie” [Iniquity, Lawlessness]). Conscience is a very significant motif in Chekhov’s works, and it obviously plays an important role in works by many other Russian authors, including Dostoevsky, which is not something inexplicable. Unlike English culture, which, during the 17th–19th centuries, shifted from reliance on the inner moral voice in a human being to faith in outer moral rules, Russian culture, on the eve of the 20th century, still preserved the authentic Christian belief that conscience is the voice of truth in man. Since, in his essays, Galsworthy declared Chekhov the most authentic Russian writer of all he had known, it is natural to assume that whenever we speak about the English writer’s experiment dealing with the Russian concept, we should bear in mind Chekhov (as the key point to understand the experiment). The essence of the experiment can be described in terms of transplanting the Russian model of “life according to the voice of conscience” to the everyday English reality contemporary with the author within the aesthetic texture of his short story. As a result, the hero, who starts—rather unexpectedly both for himself and everybody around him— living according to his conscience, loses his social status, money, job, home, as well as trust of all those who know him. He excludes himself (and is excluded) from social life and from all possible connections with the human world: the only “world”, the only environment open for him is nature. The experiment Galsworthy made in his short story “Conscience” proves that the Russian model of “life according to the voice of conscience” is not viable in the circumstances of English reality (contemporary with the author).

Linking ethical leadership and moral voice

Purpose The study of ethical leadership has emerged as an important topic for understanding the effects of leadership in organizations. Theoretically, there is a relationship between ethical leadership and followers’ ethical behaviors but empirically, little attention has been given. The purpose of this paper is to examine how ethical leadership relates to employee’s moral voice through trust in the leader, leader−follower value congruence and moral efficacy. Design/methodology/approach The authors used a time-lagged research design, collecting multi-source data from 364 employees and their immediate supervisors, working in construction companies in Pakistan. Findings On the basis of an interactional approach, this study found that there was an interaction between ethical leadership, trust in the leader and leader−follower value congruence that affected moral voice, such that ethical leadership had the strongest positive relationship with moral voice when both trust and leader−follower value congruence were higher; and moral efficacy mediated the effect that this three-way interaction between ethical leadership, trust in the leader and leader−follower value congruence had on moral voice. Originality/value This is one of the first studies to examine the role of ethical leadership in promoting employees’ voice behavior using a time-lagged research design, particularly in construction industry.

The Outsourcing of Ethical Thinking

The teaching of professional rules, procedures and standards, as well as the existence of ethics committees and legal advisers to achieve desired behaviours for a given profession, produces an unforeseen by-product of altering the way individuals relate to ethics. The institutionalization of a moral voice, a kind of artificial conscience for the legally defined ‘artificial person’, tends to do the ethical thinking for the individual who thinks being moral means methodically following the professionally approved rules. Professionalism and the type of methodological reason it requires are becoming a substitute for internal moral reasoning and personal responsibility, despite the belief that we are becoming more morally responsibly through professional behaviour.