Ethical Perception of Leadership and Responsible Behavior: An Exploratory Study of Leaders of Public Organizations in Iraq

Abstract

The study aimed to identify the effect of the ethical perception of a sample of managers in public organizations on responsible behavior in light of the rapid changes taking place in the external environment. To achieve this, the researcher followed the descriptive analytical approach by applying a questionnaire of two parts. The first part dealt with the ethical perception according to the scale of Johnson (2015), which consisted of (22) items. The second part dealt with measuring responsible behavior, which consisted of (20) items based on the scale of Development of Ethical Behavior (Narvaez, 2006) for a sample of (125) respondents randomly chosen. The results showed that the estimation degree of managers in public governmental organizations of the level of ethical perception was average with arithmetic mean (3.26) and standard deviation (1.44). Moreover, the level of responsible behavior was average with arithmetic mean (3.19) and standard deviation (1.24). The results revealed a direct statistically significant relationship between the estimation degree of managers of the level of ethical perception and that for the level of responsible behavior, as the correlation coefficient reached (0.413). They also demonstrated statistically significant differences between the average scores of managers' estimation of the level of ethical perception attributable to the personal (demographic) variables. The study recommended that the priorities of the general agenda should focus on developing ethical perceptions of leadership in public organizations, which contributes to building and promoting responsible behavior in various directions.