Leupold and team present leadership integrity research at international conference

Chris Leupold, associate professor of psychology and Faculty Leadership Fellow, was part of a research team that recently presented two research papers at the annual conference of the Society for Industrial/Organizational  Psychology (SIOP).

SIOP is among the largest international professional conferences for scholars from organizational psychology and business departments as well as practitioners in the field. The 2013 conference was recently held in Houston April 11-13.

Both presentations focused on the role of integrity in leadership, and co-authors included Bill Gentry and Kristin Cullen (Center for Creative Leadership), John Sosik (Pennsylvania State University), Jae Uk Chun (Korea University Business School), and Scott Tonidandel (Davidson College).

In the wake of recent leadership and corporate scandals, the research team was responding to a general call in the field for more research to better understand the roles of character and integrity in leadership. In their paper titled, Integrity’s Place in Middle- and Top-Level Managerial Performance, the authors found that integrity was less important to middle-level managers’ current performance relative to other character strengths; in contrast, integrity was relatively more important in predicting the performance of top executives. The second study, Differences in Self-Other Rating Agreement of Integrity Across Managerial Levels, found that relative to middle-level managers, top executives exhibited greater discrepancies between their own self ratings of integrity and their subordinates’ ratings of the same executive’s integrity. Taken together, the results suggest that, although integrity is a greater determinant of executive’s performance, executives may have less accurate insights into their levels of integrity. The presentations included recommendations as to how to increase leaders’, and particularly executives’, insights and understandings of integrity since it is integral not only to organizations’ values but also performance.