A recent study by National Research Institute (NRI) has revealed that training public servants on ethics and values-based leadership will not necessarily improve their ethical behaviour at the workplace.
In recent years, in an effort to rectify the problem of ethics and lack of values-based culture blamed on the public sector workforce, selected groups of public servants have been attending ethics and leadership courses at the Pacific Institute of Leadership and Governance (PILAG) every year since 2015.
Findings based on an assessment of the Australian Government-supported intervention and captured in the PNG NRI Discussion Paper No. 189 titled “The contribution of ‘Precinct’ training to ethical and values-based leadership in PNG public service: Empirical evidence from a Tracer survey” have found the program to be ineffective.
The study compared the outcomes through the demonstration of six ethical values of honesty, integrity, accountability, respect, wisdom, and responsibility in the workplace for public servants who took part in the ethics and leadership courses with their counterparts who did not.
Authors of the study, Dr. Francis Odhuno, Associate Professor Eugene Ezebilo and Jeremy Goro found no significant relationship between taking ethics and leadership courses and demonstrating any of the six ethics and values-based leadership traits among public servants.
Thus, practicing ethics and values-based leadership in the workplace may not be different between participants who completed ethics and leadership courses and those who did not.
“Some PNG public servants can, however, demonstrate integrity, respect, and responsibility if they believe that they learnt something new, not necessarily from the ethics and values-based leadership courses, during their time at PILAG,” said the authors.
“Taking ethics and leadership courses does, therefore, not seem to be a determining factor in PNG public servants’ demonstration of ethical leadership traits. Instead, some public servants are able to consistently demonstrate integrity and respect without attending ethics and leadership courses,” they added.
According to the report, that implies that public servants could be facing barriers that ethics and values-based leadership training alone may not be enough to instill ethical behaviour in individuals, or for building ethics and values-based cultures within their workplaces.
This is likely to derail the implementing of the Ethics and Values-based Executive Leadership and Management Capability Framework championed by the Department of Personnel Management.
The report suggests some options for improving and/or supplementing and assessing the impact of future ethical leadership training or similar interventions.