Text

theses

Self-reflection, defined as the extent to which a person inspects and evaluates his/her thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, has been considered as part of self-consciousness in philosophy and the psychological self-regulation literature. I seek to extend the knowledge on self-reflection and behavioral ethics by adding an explicit moral component to self-reflection and by examining its effect on the leaders’ virtuous behavior. Building on the conceptions of moral self-reflection in Confucian and Western psychological research, I propose that moral self-reflection consists of self-introspection on the morality of intentions, habits, and the adherence to community norms. I further propose that moral self-reflection increases the leaders’ humble behaviors and ethical leadership but inhibits abusive supervision by providing other-oriented cognition (leader other-benefiting accountability) and moral emotions (guilt proneness). I use a mixed design of qualitative and quantitative studies for testing the theoretical model, which consists of 1) professional and manager interviews to generate items of moral self-reflection, 2) exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to validate the moral self-reflection measure, and 3) a field study of managers and their subordinates.

ETD_10452

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-50dq-j614

ETD doctoral

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