Ethical Leadership and Program Performance in the Community Development Context: A Review of Literature

Abstract

: Increased ethical challenges in the 21st century organizations has bolstered research in ethical leadership. leadership that is devoid of ethics is destructive to organizational stakeholders and the society in general. Although ethical leadership has gained more scholarly attention, there is limited research done on the influence of ethical leadership and program performance in the community development context, hence, the impacts have not been fully explored. Programs implemented by community development organizations are done over a specific period of time, and have well outlined objectives and performance indicators. Like institutions in the corporate sector, these organizations are prone to ethical challenges in the course of execution of their programs. These include corruption, fraud, unethical use of information, lack of accountability, misuse communication and technology. Existing studies have been critiqued on the basis of difficulties in establishing appropriate rewards for ethical behaviour, lack of efficient measurement parameters of ethical practices and lack of consensus on the responsibility of enforcing the ethical values in organizations. Therefore, review and synthesis of existing literature is highly required. Scholars have also suggested that it is critical to explore the practice of ethical leadership across different sectors in order to draw the contextual peculiarities. Consequently, there is a research gap in application of ethical leadership in the community development context. The researcher thus reviews extant conceptual, theoretical and empirical literature on ethical leadership and points to various gaps that present a case for a new theoretical model, linking ethical leadership to program performance outcomes. The model assesses the association between ethical leadership and program performance as mediated by organizational culture. The framework illustrates the causal linkages established through the research.