| dc.description.abstract | Organizational leaders are increasingly coming under increasing scrutiny not only because many senior executives are accused of having committed unethical acts but also because of the role that leaders at all levels are thought to play in managing the ethical (and unethical) conduct of organization members. Unethical workplace behavior has become an increasingly serious problem in many public institutions. Unethical behavior in organizations has been widely reported in the wake of many recent high-profile corporate scandals. Ethical problems are not unique to the United States and Europe only.
Top business and government officials in Japan have been caught in a major influence peddling scheme. Similar charges have been brought against top officials in South Korea, the People's Republic of China, Brazil, Pakistan, and Zaire. Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda and Kenya, are listed as one of the worst corrupt countries in the wprld by Transparence International.
The purpose of this study was to determine leadership factors that that influences workplace behaviors of employees taking a case of Municipal Council of Kisumu (MCK). The study adopted a descriptive design to: establish the influence of modeling leadership on workplace behaviors of MCK employees; determine how the enforcement of code of ethics by leaders influences workplace behaviors of MCK employees; ascertain the influence of human resource treatment on workplace behaviors of MCK employees; explore the influence of workplace ethical climate on the workplace behavior of MCK employees.
The study applied .Bandura's Social Learning Theory to explain how these leadership factors influence employees' workplace behaviors and used stratified random sampling to select the study respondents. It is hoped that this study will enhance scholars' understanding of the influence of ethical leadership in a non-western context, thus hopefully stimulating further research in this area and help the top-level personnel of Municipal Council ofKisumu in creating working environment that nurtures ethical standards among their staff.
The limitations of this study are that it is confmed to employees of MCK and it may be perceived as insufficient to be representative of other councils. Also, the study relied solely on employees' observations, views, opinions and perceptions which may be subjective. A total of 207 MCK participated in the study and significant percentages acknowledged the existence of a number of unethical workplace behaviors among council's employees including: show of favoritism/nepotism absenteeism, lateness and sneaking out before time, use of office properties for personal gain, asking or accepting kickbacks, false accusation of coworkers, sealing from the council and ineffectiveness or sluggishness were mentioned by at least 30.0% of the respondents.
Generally, 44.9% and 45-9% of the respondents rated the modeling leadership of the council how the leadership enforces the code of ethics of the council as average. A total of 43.5% of the respondents rated how the leadership treats it employees as below average. Significant proportions of the respondents who were able to associate the observed unethical workplace behavior to the modeling leadership as follows enforcement of code of ethics by leaders the way employees are treated.
In general, the study results showed that leaders have an important influence on employee ethical behavior. So that in an organization leadership. is enormously important and deserves more attention in our attempts to understand employee ethical and unethical behavior. For future research that would help better understand and explain the importance of ethical leadership behavior and its impact on employee outcomes. First, in order to improve generalization of the findings, future research should increase the sample size and broaden the sample location from a site to a larger regional or national site. Second, though this study relied solely on respondents' perception and opinions of ethical leadership, one might want to consider observational and exploratory data collection method in future research. | en_US |
