Ethical leadership in South Africa and Botswana

Abstract

This study was conducted to investigate the extent of ethical leadership practices in African public utilities, given the relatively high corruption reported in such institutions, with consequences of seriously constrained development of national economies and significant hindrance to good governance. Our aim was to establish potential benefits from ethical leadership in public sector agencies by analysing ethical leadership characteristics in the public sector from Botswana and South Africa. We measured ethical leadership perceptions utilizing a combination of scales in an attempt to encompass the larger breadth of ethical leadership scales found in the literature in order to determine how employees perceived their managers in terms of being moral people and moral managers. A total of 108 respondents completed questionnaires. Results indicate that there were significant differences between the perceptions of managers’ moral conduct. South African leaders were perceived as relatively weaker moral managers as compared to those in Botswana.