THE EFFECT OF EMOTIONAL LABOUR IN ETHICAL LEADERS ON WORKAHOLISM Cover Image

ETİK LİDERLERDE DUYGUSAL EMEĞİN İŞKOLİKLİĞE ETKİSİ
THE EFFECT OF EMOTIONAL LABOUR IN ETHICAL LEADERS ON WORKAHOLISM

Author(s): Olgun Irmak ÇETİN
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Business Economy / Management, Business Ethics
Published by: Sakarya üniversitesi
Keywords: Ethical Leadership; Workaholism; Emotional Labour; Moderator Effect Analysis;

Summary/Abstract: A Leader, as a factor affecting stakeholders inside and outside the organization, is someone who controls all the behaviors and who is imitated and observed by the members of the organization. Ethical behavior set of the leader display his or her ethical attitudes, and he or she will be forced to display proactive efforts. In many definitions, workaholism is described as a need to work continuously in a compulsive and uncontrollable way. The two elements that trigger workaholism is individual’s willingness to overwork and unmanageable inner desires to work continuously. As the excess of working period may be evaluated as a criterion, there may also be underlying factors such as economic worries and promotion. The important thing here is that employees with inner motivation to work and contextual performance needn’t be confused with those who have inner pressure even if they don’t want to work. Emotional integrity is an important factor affecting the behavior set of employees in the work environment. An employee developing emotions that are compatible with the organizational climate and culture thrives not to stay far from the social environment. For that reason, he or she develops emotion management in the long term. Emotional management efforts made by employees paves the way for the decrease in organizational conflicts and aggression and makes it possible for the organizational conformity to develop.In their studies, in which they described ethical leadership, Brown et al. (2005) attracting attention to the ethical scandals including governmental bodies, companies, academic world and even non-profit institutions emphasized that ethical leadership is becoming more and more important. The reason for this is the display of appropriate behavior and attitude, communication and the need for decision making in personal behaviors and mutual relation in a normative sense. Ethical leaders can be counted on to do the right thing”, and they demonstrate “high standards of ethical and moral conduct”. Emotion that is normally abstract and a characteristic of an individual, today as an economic asset, it is perceived as a concrete product. “Emotional Labor” in the work environment is regarded as various service activities and an important combination of various occupations. Evaluated together with emotion and labor, this concept is given a lot of importance in the field of organizational behavior, which can be explained as “the impression that a person made in his or her inner world related to his or her work process that he or she consciously created. The term “Workaholism” was coined by Oates (1968), who describes it as “the compulsion or the uncontrollable need to work incessantly”. Another definition about workaholism is that “obsessive commitment which is characterized by high employeesambitions,∈ability→controlhabits∈theworkplace,and→oμchwork(workdedication)co∩ectedwithlackofthe∈÷als activity in other areas of life, which results in the deterioration of employee`s well-being and dysfunctional interpersonal relationships”.The goal of this study is to investigate the thesis that the perception of emotional labor will in time turn into workaholism in the leader who displays ethical behaviors in work life. The study was realized through the questionnaire technique. The population of the study consists of service corporations located in Edirne, Kırklareli and Tekirdağ. The sample of the study consists of selected service corporations operating in these cities. The questionnaires were applied to 126 executives in medium and high positions from 21 different businesses such as banking, insurance and real estate. The questionnaires were designed as 7-point Likert scale. The participants were given ten questions to measure ethical leadership, 17 to find out workaholic behavior, 12 to detect emotional labor and five questions related to demographic data. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted using structural equation model. The research model of the study was structured as “Ethical Leadership” as independent variable “Workaholism” as a dependent variable, “Emotional Labor” moderator variable. The results show that leaders with Ethical behavior develop Deep acting and Surface acting, and Deep acting in Ethical leaders leads to workaholism. The hypothesis of the study are given below:H1: Ethical leadership has a positive and significant effect on the workaholic attitude.H2: Emotional labor behavior has a regulatory effect between ethical leadership and workaholism.H2a: The superficial emotional labor behavior has a regulatory effect between ethical leadership and workaholism.H2b: Suppressed emotional labor behavior has a regulatory effect between ethical leadership and workaholism.H2c: In-depth emotional labor behavior has a regulatory effect between ethical leadership and workaholism.To test the moderation effect of Emotional Labor perception, which is the main aim of the study, moderation effect analyses were applied. What should be done for this purpose are, centralization of all variables to be analyzed, all sub-dimensions of independent variables and all sub-dimensions of the moderator variable to be individually multiplied and subjected to Confirmatory Factor Analysis for the term of interaction and inclusion in the model, and finally clarification of the results to be interpreted by drawing the moderation effect graph.As a result of the analysis, the H1 hypothesis was confirmed, and the H2 hypothesis was partially confirmed. The reason for this is the rejection of the H2b hypothesis while validating the H2a and H2c hypotheses. The main reason for the validation of the hypothesis H1 is that the managers who demonstrate leadership feature and are loyal to ethical values are tied to their jobs and perceived by the observers as Workaholic. An excessive effort for this purpose will lead to the Ethical Leader being Workaholic.If the Ethical Leader who demonstrates superficial Emotional Labor behavior has a high perception of ethical leadership behavior, this will rapidly increase the workaholism behavior of the leader as the Ethical Leadership feature increases. If the Ethical Leader who demonstrates superficial Emotional Labor behavior has a low perception of ethical leadership behavior, this will rapidly decrease the leader's display of Workaholism behavior. On the other hand, if the Ethical Leader who demonstrates in-depth Emotional Labor behavior has a high perception of ethical leadership behavior, then it is understood that as the Ethical Leadership feature increases, the leader’s Workaholism behavior will be slowly increased. If the ethical leader who demonstrates in-depth Emotional Labor behavior has a low perception of ethical leadership behavior, there appears to be a very slight increase in the Workaholism behavior of the leader.

  • Issue Year: 6/2018
  • Issue No: 3
  • Page Range: 215-238
  • Page Count: 24
  • Language: Turkish