Who’s Evaluating Whom? The Public Evaluation of Public and Private Leaders’ Unethical Behaviors

One of the theoretical cores and values of good governance is the accountability of public employees, where the citizens expect the public employees to maintain professional standards, avoid conflicts of interest, respect the principles of fair and impartial treatment, and use public money wisely. However, are these unique moral standards to which only public employees are held? The dissertation seeks to examine how the public evaluates the unethical behaviors of public and private leaders differently to better understand the sources of public and private sector differences in the public’s normative evaluations.

Based on a randomized online vignette experiment with 1,569 respondents residing in the United States collected in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, the dissertation confirms that public authorities face different levels of public tolerance relative to business managers. More specifically, the unethical behaviors of a public manager are less likely to be tolerated than the same misconduct of a business manager, while ethical offenses of elected officials are least likely to be tolerated by the public. However, the public is relatively much less tolerant of public managers’ and elected officials’ petty violations relative to business managers than they do for more egregious violations of public authorities.

The dissertation further finds that public evaluations are contingent upon the respondents’ work experience in different sectors. Individuals working in government are more likely to be tolerant of petty unethical behaviors, regardless of whom they evaluate, but they become much less tolerant of public managers’ and elected officials’ grand ethical violations. The longer individuals work in for-profit organizations, the less likely they are to tolerate public authorities’ petty violations of organizational rules while consistently being more accepting of the unethical behaviors of business managers.

Using an experimental design, the dissertation finds the importance of a fair and legitimate use of tax money in the public’s moral evaluations of public leadership and further discusses the potential sources of public skepticism of the public sector. Furthermore, the public and private sector comparison provides theoretical and practical implications for ethics reform in the era of collaborative governance.