Toward a new understanding of leader accountability: defining a critical construct.

This article defines leader accountability as (a) the leader's willing acceptance of the responsibilities inherent in the leadership position to serve the well-being of the organization; (b) the implicit or explicit expectation that the he/she will be publicly linked to his/her actions, words,

or reactions; and (c) the expectation that the leader may be called on to explain his or her beliefs, decisions, commitments, or actions to constituents. This paper presents and defines accountability in a manner that provides greater clarity than prior literature attempts and sets the stage for future research.

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Leader accountability has been hailed as both a proactive step in building and sustaining a climate of trust and credible leadership (Fairholm, 2001; McClellan, 1999) and as a remedial step in restoring trust and credibility once lost by the leader (Kouzes & Posner, 1993). Against the backdrop of nearly fifty years of research on leadership and its relationship to organizational trust (Jones, 1997; Korthius-Smith, 2000; Hosmer, 1995), increased reports of clergy sexual misconduct, corporate accounting scandals, and political upheaval on both a state and federal level have led to increased interest in, and demand for, systems to hold leaders accountable for their communication and behavior (Jewett, 1999; McClellan, 1999; Lerner & Tetlock, 1999). Empirical understanding of organizational trust has grown significantly (Hosmer, 1995), and both scholarly and popular publications have examined transformational leader credibility extensively (cf. Kouzes & Posner, 1993). The constructs of organizational trust and leader credibility alone, however, critical as they are to organizational effectiveness (Ryan & Oestreich, 1998), are insufficient to account for the human or transformational dimensions of leadership because violated trust tends to destroy both. Tetlock (1999) asserts that no social system can function for a sustained period without accountability checks on group members. Sedikides, Herbst, Hardin, & Dardis (2002) add that accountability pressures have been indicated as a means through which a social structure or social situation can influence individual behavior, reminding them of the need to act in compliance with prevailing norms and justify conduct that deviates from those norms. In spite of the many calls for and debates over accountability, however, to this point no statistically reliable or valid methods for empirically measuring leader accountability have appeared in the growing body of literature on this subject with the notable possible exception by Stogdill and Shartle (1975) who developed an instrument to measure the factors of responsibility, authority, and delegation. A reviewer of this article pointed out that the responsibility and authority scales were highly correlated and approximated accountability. The authors of this current article believe that the responsibility and authority scales do not measure accountability as the literature defines accountability and thus the purpose of this article is to define the construct of leader accountability in order to prepare the way for future research.