Ethical Leadership Style Questionnaire (ELSQ) Test

Managers, supervisors, educators, and other people who make consequential choices can use this assessment to examine the principles guiding their responses to workplace dilemmas. The Ethical Leadership Style Questionnaire (ELSQ) Test focuses on how a decision balances rules, consequences, character, care, self-interest, and fairness. It offers an ethical leadership assessment for structured reflection on judgment in organizational roles.

What This Assessment Explores

These scenarios make the ethical leadership questionnaire useful for examining approaches to clashing duties. They cover misconduct, hardship, financial honesty, bias, and fairness. The result describes how these approaches appear in leadership decisions, rather than moral philosophy alone.

The choices represent ethical approaches:

• Rule-based action follows duties, policies, and obligations.
• Consequence-based action seeks the greatest benefit.
• Virtue-based action asks what a good person would do.
• Care-based action responds to relationships and human needs.
• Self-interested action prioritizes goals or advantage.
• Justice-based action applies fairness and equitable treatment.

Results appear on the Ethical Leadership Style Questionnaire scale, 0-100: Developing alignment 0-39, Moderate alignment 40-69, and Strong alignment 70-100. The result assesses ethical aspects of leadership behavior by showing how responses align with ethical principles in management and decision-making; it can support self-assessment or evaluate another leader.

Methodology and Scientific Basis

Each item presents a hypothetical leadership dilemma with six forced-choice responses. The respondent selects the action that best explains the intended decision, rather than rating agreement or frequency. Repeated response types across changing contexts allow respondents to compare their choices across dilemmas.

Its structure makes it a leadership decision-making test, but the online score does not disclose a per-answer weighting rule. The displayed range should not be reverse-engineered into assumed points for particular options.

The six ethical approaches function as a theoretical framework described by Northouse (2021). Chikeleze’s 2014 dissertation and the 2017 study by Chikeleze and Baehrend describe the published ELSQ as a self-assessment of preferred ethical style when leaders process dilemmas, distinct from followers’ ratings of leader behavior. This 10-item online form is conceptually consistent with that work, but it should not be treated as the same validated instrument or as a documented adaptation. This evidence does not establish separate norms or fresh standardization for this short online form.

Use the result to examine reasoning habits and how principles may affect stakeholders. Self-report can be influenced by self-presentation, current circumstances, and limited self-awareness, so conclusions about conduct or leadership effectiveness require broader evidence.