17. The need for ethical leadership:
moral compass and courage
Like radars, people search their surroundings for signals which indicate how they should
behave. Research shows that seeing someone in the street give something to a collector
increases the chance that we too will give, and if someone throws rubbish into the street,
the chance increases that we will do the same. Both good and bad examples apparently have
followers. Will we follow just anyone’s behavior, or do we pick and choose our models?
Social learning theory states that we learn what we should do from the behavior of others,
and are particularly inclined to learn from others who have some signiicance to us, who we
see as our role models and who we wish to relect in our behavior. We give more weight to the
behavior of role models, following it more closely, storing it better in our brains and recalling it
more easily. Role models therefore make more of a mark on our behavior than others within
or outside our group. Kees Keizer (see also chapters 14 and 15) shows the effect of this in a
simple experiment. This is the inal lyer experiment to be discussed in this book.
Keizer ixed a lyer advertizing the latest issue of the magazine Knowledge to the handlebars
of a number of bicycles in the bike shed of a university. On the lyer was the text: ‘The majority
of …, 80 percent, commit plagiarism. Read all about it in Knowledge.’ One set of lyers
stated that 80 percent of professors committed plagiarism. Next to the text was a photo of a
professor in a toga. On the other lyers the text stated that 80 percent of students committed
plagiarism, with a photo of a student. In both photos a black strip was printed across the eyes,
to emphasize that plagiarism was a transgression of the norm. Once again there was no trash
can to be seen in the area. What did they discover? Of the cyclists who found the lyer with
the student, 39 percent threw it on the ground. The lyer with the professor was thrown away
a third more, at 52 percent.
Those who symbolize group norms are more inluential in determining the behavior of people
in that group than are other group members. In Keizer’s experiment the professors were the
role models for the students, so that the reprehensible behavior of the professors had more
inluence on the behavior of students throwing away lyers than that of their fellow students.
17.The need for ethical leadership: moral compass and courage
