Ethical Leadership Strengthens Team Efficacy and Social Cohesion

Summary: Under real-world pressures, teams, however well constituted, can hit periods of poor performance. When this happens, it is important the belief team members have in their collective ability—as well as their sense of psychological connectedness—remains strong, so that their performance can recover.

A team’s perception of its own efficacy and social integration impacts its level of performance. A new study finds that this relationship is moderated by the ethical stance of the team’s leadership. Ethical leaders can bolster a team’s belief in its efficacy and social integration to support a bounce back following poor performance. When leaders act less than ethically, this belief breaks down.

A fact of teamwork that we will all be familiar with is that when a team performs well, team members’ faith in their collective ability increases. Similarly, feelings of cohesion and social integration amongst the team also grows. This leads to the team setting high goals, successfully sustaining motivation toward those goals, and being able to adapt well to any negative feedback that should arise. The reverse is also true. When the team performs poorly, these factors are eroded and the ability to recover diminishes.

Put another way, high performance feeds confidence in the team’s abilities, promotes togetherness, and makes team membership desirable.  Poor performance on the other hand lowers expectations for the future. A sense of failure weakens members desire to associate with the team, threatens its ability to remain intact, and can lead to further poor performance. This perpetuating effect—whether on a ‘winning team’ or ‘losing team’—has obvious practical implications for long-term team effectiveness.

Ethical leadership in the field

A recent study from Sean R. Martin, a faculty affiliate of the Center for Innovative Leadership at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, in collaboration with Kyle J. Emich, Elizabeth J. McClean, and Col. Todd Woodruff, raises the question: how can team leaders enjoy the benefits of positive performance, while limiting the erosion of belief in team efficacy and social integration that occurs when performance dips? 

The researchers argue that ethical leadership can moderate the relationship between team performance and team efficacy beliefs, and between performance and the perceptions of psychological connectedness that foster social integration. Testing this theory in a field study of U.S. military teams actively engaged in competition, the research team found that ethical leadership helps ensure belief in team efficacy and social integration are maintained, even when their teams do not perform well.

Prior to this research several characteristics of ethical leadership have been shown in numerous studies to have a positive effect on the teams they lead. Ethical leaders act as role models, develop healthy ways of communicating that are fair and caring, while focusing on goals that define success not just by end results but also by how results were obtained. Ethical leaders set behavioral examples that encourage open communication, trust, and positive interpersonal relationships within their team.

Three connections: from ethics to efficacy 

There are three ways in which these characteristics of ethical leadership allow teams to better maintain their belief in team efficacy and team social cohesion:

1. Emphasizing the means as well as the ends. Ethical leaders do not portray success solely in terms of winning or making money. They value good process and acting ethically in pursuit of a goal. This approach can influence team members to consider more than just ‘bottom line’ performance when they evaluate their work. If performance has been worse than expected, but the team has acted ethically in the eyes of an ethical leader, team members will see it as having still accomplished a great deal.
2. Fostering two-way communication between leaders and followers. This creates a climate conducive to raising issues, suggesting ways to improve processes while also encouraging people to speak up about things that are going well. In this way ethical leaders make it more likely that their teams will identify causes of poor performance earlier.
3. Building positive team relationships. Ethical leaders have the best interests of their teams in mind and prioritize building good relationships within their teams. They not only praise the positive aspects of team performance but also reassure team members that they can perform better in the future when things have not gone well. This helps head-off negative responses to poor performance ahead of time.

Ethical leadership, efficacy and belief

Team efficacy reflects team members’ beliefs and convictions about their collective ability to execute a given course of action, and their assessment of their collective ability to accomplish future tasks. Efficacy is important in that teams in which it is high set themselves higher goals and are more resilient in the face of difficulties. Efficacy beliefs are largely built on past experiences and influenced by judgments about meeting expectations based on the past. 

Ethical leadership, by emphasizing the means as well as the ends, and by encouraging learning and the ownership of processes, takes the focus away from purely objective assessments of performance outcomes. Ethical leaders, by setting goals related to values and to process and through their behavioral example, weaken the connection in team members’ minds between performance and their perceptions of efficacy.

Ethical leadership and social integration

Social integration reflects an interpersonal and affective component of team functioning. While performing poorly is a frustrating experience that people want to avoid, high performance engenders positive feelings toward oneself and one’s teammates. High-fives all round lead to greater social integration.

Ethical leadership—open communication, valuing processes in addition to outcomes, and establishing positive reciprocity in teams—also weakens the connection between performance and social integration, making team social interaction and integration less influenced by objective performance. 

By encouraging communication and identifying opportunities to improve, ethical leadership enables learning and a sense of ownership within teams. Valuing processes over outcomes enables team members to recognize each other’s contributions. Ethical and empathetic leaders, by modeling desirable behaviors, create climates that encourage trust and benevolence among team members—while setting them up to better navigate any dip in performance levels that may occur.

The Center for Innovative Leadership (CIL) at the Carey Business School aims to advance knowledge and build capacity for innovative leadership in modern organizations. CIL is a hub for new ideas and insights on leadership, combining faculty-led research, student-facing programming, and community-focused impact.