Are Managers in Slovakia Ethical Leaders? Key Findings on the Level of Ethical Leadership in the Slovak Business Environment

Abstract

Ethical leadership is a highly relevant and up-to-date topic in management studies because it represents a genuine key to improved work environment. To date, there was a considerable lack of empirical data on this specific leadership approach especially in the Central and Eastern European part of the world. This article represents an original and novel contribution to the respective field with preliminary results of an extensive ethical leadership research in the Slovak business environment carried out on the sample of 810 managers. Based on exploratory research design, results point out that ethical leadership is just moderately embedded in the current Slovak management practice and leaders do not utilize the full potential of ethics management tools at workplace. Still, there are some interesting commonalities and differences in the level of ethical leadership across the Slovak sample regarding the regional company location, company ownership, and company size.