Are good leaders moral leaders?

This thesis presents selected works investigating the relation between leadership and morals. Given the multitude of moral challenges and the grave consequences of moral transgressions in military operations, we have chosen a military context to frame our research. Transformational leadership and the full range of leadership model (FRLM) are key constructs in this investigation, as this leadership concept has been shown to be related to operational effectiveness in military as well as other organizational contexts. However, the relationship between such leadership and morals has been questioned in leadership literature. The first study investigated whether officers’ self-importance of moral identity and their activation of moral justice schemas were related to effective leadership. The second study investigated whether sleep deprivation, which is a condition of high prevalence in military operations, affected leaders’ activation of moral justice schemas, and, consequently, their ability to make sound moral judgments. Lastly, the third study investigated the relationship between effective leadership and moral justice behavior in a situation of high moral intensity and temptation. The studies included samples from 72 to 168 officer cadets from the Norwegian Naval and Military Academies. The results from our first study showed that the ability to activate mature moral justice schemas (measured by the DIT-2 test) as well as selfimportance of moral identity (measured by the SIMI-scale) is positively associated with transformational and transactional leadership (measured by the MLQ-5X), while a negative relation was found for passive-avoidant leadership. On the one hand, these results replicate previous findings that there is a positive relationship between activation of justice schemas