Development of the Leader Integrity Assessment

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to develop a direct and concise perceived leader integrity instrument that is posed from a positive perspective. The integrity construct in this study is developed from the tradition of moral philosophy and virtue ethics. The integrity construct in this study incorporates two aspects of integrity found in the literature, namely value-behavior congruence and a requirement that this congruence be grounded in morality. The moral philosophy used in this study to ground the integrity construct is virtue ethics as proposed by ancient philosophy and later maintained by Christian virtue ethics in the middle ages. An expert panel was used to establish content validity and construct validity/reliability was established via analysis of three samples of Air Force personnel associated with the U-2 pilot community. Nomological validity is established by leveraging the resultant Leader Integrity Assessment 15 to investigate the hypothesized moderating effects on the relationship between leader prototypicality and follower trust in the leader as proposed in the Kalshoven and Den Hartog (2009) Ethical Leadership Model. Overall, the Leader Integrity Assessment 15 was found valid and reliable and the integrity construct was found unidimensional as hypothesized.