Abstract

The study examines the main effects and interacting effects of managers' and direct reports' ethic of virtue on leader-member exchanges. A pilot study, testing a developed measure of ethics of virtue, sampling 188 students and collecting 557 iterations of the ethic of virtue measure and subsequent reliability and confirmatory factor analysis yielded strong support for a six factor model: courage, trustworthiness, loyalty, justice, caring and honor. A field study examined 94 manager-direct report dyads of human resource professionals. Multiple regression analysis indicated partial support for the direct effects of managers' caring and managers' honor ethics of virtue on leader-member exchanges as measured by both managers' and direct reports' responses on the LMX-7 and LMX-MDM. Analysis of interaction of ethic of virtue indicated managers' trust and direct reports' caring ethics of virtue predicted leader-member exchanges as well as managers' caring and direct reports' honor ethics of virtue predicted leader-member exchanges. Directions for future research are also discussed