Perceived ethical leadership: Its moderating influence on employees’ organisational commitment and organisational citizenship behaviours

This study investigated the extent to which employees’ perception of ethical leadership moderated their organisational commitment and organisational citizenship behaviour. A non-probability purposive sample (N = 839; females = 32%) of employees in a railway organisation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) participated in the study. They completed the following measures: the Organisational Commitment Scale (OCS), the Organisational Citizenship Behaviour Questionnaire (OCBQ) and the Ethical Leadership Scale (ELS). Stepwise hierarchical regression analysis was utilised to determine the influence of employees’ perceptions of the relationships between their self-reported organisational commitment and organisational citizenship behaviour. The results indicated employee perceptions of the integrity, fairness and honesty aspects of ethical leadership to explain their affective, continuance and normative aspects of organisational commitment and organisational citizenship behaviour. The results also showed that employee perceptions of high ethical leadership influenced their willingness to engage in positive organisational commitment such as psychological attachment, work continuance, normative commitment and also their organisational citizen behaviours such as altruism, conscientiousness, courtesy and civic virtue. By implication, leaders with high ethical conduct have the potential to positively stimulate the commitment of employees towards supporting the organisational values and mission.     

Sound and the Korean Public: Sonic Citizenship in the Governance of Apartment Floor Noise Conflicts

Apartment floor noise is becoming a serious social problem in South Korea. Apartment floor noise conflicts arise from the disruption of neighbourhood community in Korean apartment complexes. To resolve the conflicts, the Korean government and apartment residents employ two modes of governance: technocratic and collaborative. These models of governance create legal and community standards of floor noise that constitute sonic citizenship—the status of residents as normal listeners with both the duty to reduce noise and the right to make noise. Using Sheila Jasanoff’s idea of ‘constitutive coproduction’, floor noise in the form of sonic knowledge is constitutively coproduced with sonic citizenship in the form of public knowledge. When apartment residents cannot bear normal sound, defined by the two modes of governance, they become abnormal listeners. If normal listeners cannot put up with the level of sound from upstairs, this sound becomes floor noise. Sonic knowledge is, therefore, vital to the construction of sonic citizenship. In technocratic governance, sonic citizenship emerges from the limits of endurance in governmental floor noise standards, based on results of an auditory perception test based on noise and vibration engineering. In collaborative governance, sonic citizenship results from voluntary agreements between apartment residents. Through such governances, governmental officials and apartment residents perceive a distinction between normal and abnormal residents or between normal and abnormal apartment life.     

Psychological capital as a team phenomenon: Mediating the relationship between learning climate and outcomes at the individual and team levels

Psychological capital is a positive psychological state that influences employees’ behaviors and attitudes. Research has only recently begun to examine the phenomenon as a shared psychological team state. The purpose of this research is to examine the mediating role of team psychological capital in the relationship between learning climate and outcomes at the individual and team levels. The findings, which were carried out among 82 school management teams, indicated a positive relationship between learning climate and the team’s psychological capital, and between the team’s psychological capital and the individual’s job satisfaction and the team’s organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). It was also found that team’s psychological capital mediates the relationship between the team’s learning climate and job satisfaction, and between learning mechanisms and the team’s OCB. The findings might encourage research into psychological capital as a team phenomenon and encourage decision-makers to develop ways of reinforcing psychological capital among teams.     

Rawls's Wide View of Public Reason: Not Wide Enough

Res Publica - What sorts of reasons are i) required and ii) morally acceptable when citizens in a pluralist liberal democracy undertake to resolve pressing political issues? This paper presents and...     

The Complexity of Justice - A Challenge to the 21st Century

The author discusses two questions, the relation between liberalism and democracy, and the relation between ethics, morality and law. As to the first question, she argues that neither liberalism nor democracy are merely formal. Roughly spoken, it can be said that liberalism stands for negative liberties, whereas democracy stands for positive ones. She observes a non-contingent tension between the ethos of liberalism (personal freedom) and the ethos of democracy (equality; majority rule). It is the task of morality to maintain and restore the balance between these two kinds of ethos. As to the second question, she is worried about the balance between law (legal regulation), ethics, and morality. On the one hand, abolishing legal regulations would amount to abolishing the freedom of the moderns. On the other hand, the substitution of legal regulations for ethical regulations would lead to a similar result: the end of the freedom of the moderns through the homogenisation of life. In the former case, personal support, charity, magnanimity, and caring would get lost, while in the latter there would be no escape from community pressure towards uniformity.     

Openness to experience and creativity: When does global citizenship matter?

The relationship between the openness to experience trait (OTE) and creativity has been well documented in previous research. Likewise, the global citizenship construct has theoretical overlap with both OTE and creativity. We hypothesised global citizenship would make a unique contribution to explaining variance in five types of creativity (self/everyday, scholarly, performance, mechanical/scientific and artistic), above and beyond the contribution of OTE. Participants were predominantly female, European American, traditionally aged college students (N = 407). Global citizenship prosocial outcomes explained unique variance in self/everyday (sr² = .10), scholarly (sr² = .03) and mechanical/scientific (sr² = .03) creativity. Results are discussed in terms of dual processes theories of cognition.     

Validation of the work engagement,job satisfaction,psychological empowerment,and organisational citizenship measures in a mining sector setting in Zimbabwe

This study aimed to validate measures of work engagement, job satisfaction, psychological empowerment, and organisational citizenship for use with employees in a mining enterprise in Zimbabwe. Miners (N = 176, males = 85.2%, females = 1.3%; age range = 24–65 years; general workers = 92%) completed the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES), the Psychological Empowerment Scale (PES), the Minnesota Job Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ20), and Organisational Citizenship Behaviour Checklist (OCB-C20). Findings, following exploratory factor analysis, suggest scores from the UWES, PES, MSQ20, and OCB20 to be reliable for research purposes in the Zimbabwean mining sector setting.     

Stripping Citizenship: Does Membership Have Its (Moral) Privileges?

If states have the moral authority to decide their memberships by denying citizenship, I argue that they may also strip citizenship, from law-abiding members, for the same reasons. The only real difference is that when states revoke citizenship they may need to compensate people for their prior contributions, but that is not unlike what frequently occurs in divorce. Once just termination rules are established, stripping citizenship could become, like divorce, an everyday event. Partly because of this implication, we should reject the membership authority of states.     

Essentialism in Social Representations of Citizenship: An Analysis of Greeks' and Migrants' Discourse

Following a Social Representations approach, the article examines the representations of citizenship held by both migrants and Greek citizens in Greece after the announcement of a heavily debated citizenship legislation. Essentialism, a way of representing social categories as holding an underlying essence that determines their characteristics, was used as an analytical tool to understand the inclusive or exclusive function of representations of citizenship towards migrants. Findings showed that Greeks construct representations based on ethnic, civic, and cultural ideas, while migrants construct representation of citizenship based on civic and cultural ideas. Essentialism was a way of constructing ethnic and cultural representations of citizenship and functioned in both exclusive and inclusive ways, but assimilatory terms accordingly. Civic and cultural representations of citizenship were constructed in nonessentialist ways and functioned in inclusive ways. However, from Greeks' perspective, civic inclusion was conditioned upon an often‐questioned legality of migrants and upon cultural assimilation terms. Studying both the content and the essentialist/nonessentialist formulation of representations of citizenship is an important tool in understanding the politics of inclusion and exclusion of citizens in the social arena.     

Civic Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Alternative Paths to the Development of Political Knowledge and Democratic Values

Despite the proliferation of civic education programs in the emerging democracies of Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe, there have been few recent evaluations of the effectiveness of civics instruction in achieving changes in democratic orientations among student populations. We present findings from a study conducted in 1998 that examined the impact of democratic civic education among South African high school students. Using a battery of items to gauge democratic orientations, including measures of political knowledge, civic duty, tolerance, institutional trust, civic skills, and approval of legal forms of political participation, we find that civic education had the largest effects on political knowledge, with the magnitude of the effect being approximately twice as large as the recent Niemi and Junn (1998 ) finding for the United States. Exposure to civic education per se had weaker effects on democratic values and skills; for these orientations, what matters are specific factors related to the quality of instruction and the use of active pedagogical methods employed by civics instructors. Further, we find that civic education changed the structure of students' orientations: a "democratic values" dimension coalesces more strongly, and in greater distinction, from a "political competence" dimension among students exposed to civic education than among those with no such training. We discuss the implications of the findings for our theoretical understanding of the role of civic education in fostering democratic attitudes, norms, and values, as well as the practical implications of the results for the implementation and funding of civic education programs in developing democracies in the future.