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Introduction
Recently, corruption in business and politics has contributed to bringing ethics to the forefront of public awareness by highlighting the effects of unethical behavior on organizations. Consequently, an increasing number of researchers have become interested in understanding the ethical dimensions of leadership. Our own research program aims at understanding the role different ethical dimensions play in the exercise of ethical leadership. This research program has led to a better understanding of ethical leadership in education ([40], [41] Langlois, 1997, 2004), to the identification of ethical sensitivity as a component of ethical conduct ([43] Langlois and Lapointe, 2009), to the development and experimentation of a training program for ethical leadership ([44] Langlois and Lapointe, 2010), as well as to the conception of Ethical Leadership Questionnaire (ELQ), a questionnaire measuring ethical leadership as conceptualized by [65] Starratt (1991). This last step of our research program aimed at contributing to what [67] Starratt (2012) calls the cultivation of ethical schools. In this paper, we present the process which led to the development and validation of the ELQ.
Problem statement
In the 1970s and 1980s, interest in the moral dimensions of educational administration grew out of work by [5] Bates (1982), [26] Foster (1986), [29] Greenfield (1987), [30] Halpin (1970), and [32] Hodgkinson (1978) who insisted on the need for a repositioning of leadership on axiological foundations. Starratt, in his seminal paper published in 1991, took a major step in this direction by incorporating moral reasoning and critical theory constructs into his model of ethical leadership. A few years later, [6] Beck (1994) adopted a position based on an ethic of care while [12] Brunner (1998) found that two ethical components could be identified in the way educational leaders work: the ethic of justice and the ethic of care. These initial studies were part of a growing body of literature in educational administration (e.g. [6] Beck, 1994; [7] Begley and Johansson, 2003; [19] Cranston et al. , 2005;[20] Crowson, 1989; [24] Enomoto and Kramer, 2007; [36] Kirby et al. , 1992; [49] Marshall et al. , 1993; [50] Maxcy, 2002; [68] Stefkovich and Shapiro, 1995[1] ; [70] Strike et al. , 1998), which provided a framework for studying the characteristics of an ethics-oriented practice of educational leadership.
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