Ethical leadership in South Africa and Botswana.

AutorCheteni, Priviledge
CargoReport

Abstract

This study was conducted to investigate the extent of ethical leadership practices in African public utilities, given the relatively high corruption reported in such institutions, with consequences of seriously constrained development of national economies and significant hindrance to good governance. Our aim was to establish potential benefits from ethical leadership in public sector agencies by analysing ethical leadership characteristics in the public sector from Botswana and South Africa. We measured ethical leadership perceptions utilizing a combination of scales in an attempt to encompass the larger breadth of ethical leadership scales found in the literature in order to determine how employees perceived their managers in terms of being moral people and moral managers. A total of 108 respondents completed questionnaires. Results indicate that there were significant differences between the perceptions of managers' moral conduct. South African leaders were perceived as relatively weaker moral managers as compared to those in Botswana.

Key words: Africa; corruption; ethical leadership scale (ELS); managers; moral.

Introduction

Ethical leadership has been shown to have considerable benefits for both organisations and businesses. Tanner, Brugger, Schie and Lebherz (2010), Mayer, Kuenzi and Greenbaum (2010) and Piccolo, Greenbaum, Hartog and Folger (2010) demonstrate that it reduces employee absenteeism, misconduct and improves job satisfaction and performance. Rubin, Dierdorff and Brown (2010) also show that managers who are ethical leaders are often perceived to be more suitable to opportunities for promotion. It is therefore an important pillar to successful organisational operations, particularly in countries where relatively higher cases of corruption are recorded (Conrad, 2013). Heres and Lasthuizen (2010) note that the majority of studies on ethical leadership conducted in the US were mainly focused on the business environment, essentially ignoring the societal and organisational factors that may affect notions and manifestations of ethical leadership. Similarly, in Africa, most studies on ethics focus on the private sector, neglecting the public sector, which directly affects citizens.

In 2005, the South African government launched an initiative Batho Pele, meaning people first, which was aimed at improving integrity with public administration through tighter monitoring of officials' performance and compliance with ethical practices. However, Raga and Taylor (2005) argued that such legislation and proliferation of ethical codes of conduct would still be unlikely to put unethical behaviour to an end, and suggested that public officials should be indoctrinated with attitudes and virtues for guiding human conduct, since the public sector presented numerous testing situations due to its diversity. Importantly, integrity training helps officials to gain confidence in providing efficient, ethical, and accountable services.

Although considerable research has been devoted to ethics, significantly less attention has been paid to ethical leadership. Given that, a number of African countries have witnessed huge maladministration of public funds and corruption. This study argues that such behaviour is mainly attributed to leadership. Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, while addressing delegates at the Serious Social Investing Conference 2016 in South Africa, pointed out that South Africa needs ethical leaders who are not corrupt (Nicolaides, 2016). This view was mainly attributed to the landslide Constitutional ruling in South Africa, were President Zuma was said to have enriched himself with public funds. The South African Constitutional Court ruled that the President failed to uphold, defend and respect the Constitution by using taxpayer's money for his homestead upgrades. On the other hand, Botswana has an established Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime dealing with cases such as corruption, embezzlement, fraud to name a few. Given the magnitude of this challenge, a study of this nature was a necessity. Consequently, we argue that ethical leadership decadence in public entities is an urgent problem that needs to be addressed instant.

The objective of the study is to assess ethical leadership in African countries, specifically South Africa and Botswana. By comparing them, we aim to identify the shortfalls in ethical leadership, focusing on South African public institutions, which could be addressed to improve the performance of local governance. However, it is noteworthy that ethical violations, corruption, and maladministration are not problems specific to African countries only. For example, the Ethics Resource Center (2008) conducted a national survey in the United States and found that "57 percent of government employees reported that they had witnessed a violation of ethical standards, policies, or law in their workplace during the previous 12-month period" (p. 1) of which a third went unreported. Kaptein Huberts, Avelino and Lasthuizen (2005) points out that these take the form of misquoting hours worked, unfair treatment of workers, sexual harassment, and violations of privacy.

The rest of the paper is organised as follows: second section provides the literature review; third section provides the methodology that was utilised in the study; fourth section provides the findings and discussion of the results; lastly, final section concludes the study and provides recommendations.

Literature Review

Bostwana

Botswana has relatively strong and well-functioning governance institutions, both public and private. The country has a dual legal system, comprising of customary law and common law, which consists of English and Roman Dutch law, as amended by statutes (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime [UNODC], 2014). The Constitution that was adopted in 1965 positioned the institutional frameworks that recognize the parliament as a law-making, representative and oversight branch of the State aimed to make sure that the executive branch, under the President as the Head of State, delivers on its mandate (Sebudubudu, 2014). The executive branch in turn has a largely politically neutral civil service to implement all policies, plans and development programmes, including the provision of services to the public in an efficacious manner. Therefore, the Constitution established a non-racial democracy, maintaining freedom of speech, of the press and of association, and affording all citizens equal rights (UNODC, 2012).

Sebudubudu (2014) points out that the public sector in Botswana is prone to many cases of unethical practices, where many cases are of sophisticated white collar crime, and senior private business leaders, politicians and senior government officials who engage in deals involving their own families. The government established well-known authorities to fight unethical and poor governance (Office of the Auditor General, 2008). It Enacted the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC) Act in September 1994 (Gabriel, 2013). The DCEC is an operationally autonomous law enforcement agency charged with three dedicated directives: to investigate allegations of corruption and economic crime, as well as suspicious transactions, and to share investigative results with the Directorate of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for possible trials. Other mandates are to prevent corruption in the public sector by auditing government and state-owned institutions and lastly to raise awareness of the risks of corruption through public education activities (Sebudubudu, 2014). In 2012, the DCEC received 1,778 cases and 589 classifieds for investigations (Mwamba, 2013). Additionally, nepotism is rampant in the government, involving senior people and many members of the Cabinet (Dube, 2013). However, among Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, it is a leading country in terms of controlling corruption indicators compared to other countries: Corruption Perception Index 30 out of 177 countries in 2013; World Bank Doing Business ranking 56 out of 189 countries, and United Nations Human Development Index ranking 109 out of 187 in 2014 (these date were obtained from the website http://www.oecd.org/countries/botswana/).

South Africa

The systems of ethics and governance frameworks in the public sector in the South African context can be well traced and explained fully after the apartheid regime than during apartheid.

A new constitution was developed in 1996 under the platform of non-racialism and equality of all citizens (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa n. 108, 1996). The new constitution tried to address such mythical values of apartheid in the public sector. Section 195 of the Constitution states that public administration must be governed by the democratic values and principles enshrined in the Constitution. Public administration must be broadly representative of the South African people, with employment and personnel management practices based on ability, objectivity, fairness and the need to redress the imbalances of the past to achieve broad representation (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa n. 108, 1996).

In response to section 195 of the Constitution, Rosenbaum (1997) contended that public sectors were reshaped for their new role in the country. Among seven other transformation priorities, public sector ethics, efficacy and accountability were emphasized. Since then, Malunga (2014) asserts that South Africa has responded by implementing a range of legislations and the creation of democratic institutions as vital shields in its quest to build national integrity and fight corruption. This was not easy because the heterogeneous and multi-cultural society still experienced a flood of corruption as well as moral relativism and moral contextualization of the apartheid regime (Hilliard & Ferreira, 2001). To suit the needs of the country, particularly the public sector...

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