İşletme Bilimi Dergisi

Öz

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 employee`s
ambitions, inability to control habits in the workplace, and too much work
(work dedication) connected with lack of the individual`s 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.