Leader Character Signal Reaches Employees Even in Wartime Ukraine, Study Finds

In one of the most demanding workplace environments imaginable, a new study suggests that the character of a leader registers in employees’ minds in a remarkably consistent way. Researchers from Ivey Business School in Canada and Lviv Business School in Ukraine surveyed Ukrainian employees in 2021, a period when the country was simultaneously battling the COVID-19 pandemic and living through the disruption of an ongoing hybrid conflict. Their findings, published in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, indicate that when employees perceive their direct supervisors as virtuous, the effect travels through a single attitudinal gateway, job satisfaction, before fanning out to engagement, commitment, wellbeing, and even the intention to quit.

The research team, led by Lucas Monzani together with Ana C. Ruiz Pardo and Andriy Rozhdestvensky, set out to answer a question that has long troubled leadership science: does leader character matter outside the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies, often abbreviated WEIRD, where nearly all the evidence has been gathered? Ukraine in 2021 offered a pointed test case. The country ranked 122nd of 180 on the Corruption Perceptions Index, meaning formal institutions only weakly enforce the norms they espouse, and organizations were absorbing the compounding shocks of pandemic and conflict. If a character signal can be decoded by employees there, the researchers reasoned, the universality claim behind leader character frameworks gains real weight.

The study is grounded in the Leader Character Framework, a model rooted in Aristotelian virtue ethics that conceptualizes character not as a fixed personality trait but as a volitional habit of being. The framework specifies 62 observable behaviors organized into 11 dimensions, including judgment, courage, humility, integrity, drive, humanity, justice, accountability, temperance, collaboration, and transcendence. Crucially, these dimensions can become vices when enacted in excess or deficiency: courage can slide into recklessness or cowardice, humility into arrogance or obsequiousness. The authors distinguish this from personality psychology by emphasizing that character is consciously chosen, effortfully enacted, and developed through repeated practice, which is what makes it something a leader can be coached to strengthen.

To organize their question, the researchers turned to signaling theory. Applied to leadership, the theory holds that leaders emit signals and followers decode and respond to them. Character, on this account, functions as a costly signal: virtuous habits are inexpensive for leaders who have genuinely cultivated them but prohibitively expensive to fake, because simulation demands consistency across situations and over time. Because character signals are sender-referential, meaning their content is the leader’s own conduct rather than a vision or a strategy, the theory makes a directional prediction. A follower who decodes a character signal is, in the same act, forming an evaluation of the person who sent it, so the signal should register first in the follower’s attitude toward the leader.

Methodologically, the study broke new ground by measuring character at the receiving end of the signal rather than the sending end. One hundred eight Ukrainian employees rated their direct supervisors’ character using the Leader Character Insight Assessment, a 62-item instrument, and also reported on six distinct outcomes: job satisfaction, interpersonal workplace norms, work engagement, subjective wellbeing, organizational commitment, and turnover intention. After screening for careless responding, the final analytic sample comprised 94 participants, most located in the Kyiv and Lviv regions. All measures were translated into Ukrainian and back-translated to verify equivalence. The authors are careful to note that the cross-sectional, single-source design means every reported association is correlational and no causal claim is made.

The analytic strategy unfolded in five stages and paired two techniques that are rarely combined. First, psychometric network analysis mapped the conditional dependencies among leader character and the six outcomes without imposing any direction on the relationships. This regularized network produced a striking result: when the full outcome cluster was modeled jointly, job satisfaction retained the only direct edge with leader character. Every other direct connection shrank to zero. Beyond that single link, the network separated into a psychological state and mindset region on one side and an attitude and behavioral intention region on the other. At a finer grain, the satisfaction with the supervision facet clustered directly with the character dimensions, precisely where signaling theory said the signal should land.

The second half of the strategy compared four competing structural equation models, each specifying a different pathway by which character might relate to the outcomes: through work attitudes, psychological states, mindsets, or behavioral intentions. The attitudinal-volitional-motivational model, in which job satisfaction serves as the sole proximal correlate and commitment, engagement, wellbeing, norms, and turnover intention are arranged downstream, gave the most coherent account of the data. All nine of its structural paths were statistically significant, and every bootstrapped indirect effect excluded zero. In this model, satisfaction fed value-based commitment, which carried the association to work engagement, which in turn related to subjective wellbeing, while satisfaction simultaneously drove workplace norms and reduced turnover intention both directly and through commitment.

The rival specifications failed in instructive ways. The parallel attitudinal model lost its second branch, as neither the path from character to workplace norms nor the downstream paths from norms survived. The motivational entry model, which placed work engagement and value-based commitment closest to character, fit worse on every key index, with five of its eight mediator-to-outcome paths non-significant. Most tellingly, the intention-entry model, which reversed the predicted order and treated turnover intention as the doorway, contained significant paths but could not reproduce the pattern of covariances in the data; its largest residual correlations fell exactly on the character-satisfaction association the network had isolated. The convergence of the direction-free network and the directional model comparison on the same entry point gives the finding more weight than either method alone could provide.

Practically, the results carry implications for how organizations invest in their people. Because leader character sat upstream of everything else in the recovered structure, selection and promotion emerge as the earliest levers: character can be embedded into job profiles, structured interviews, and reference checks alongside conventional competence assessment, as pilots at the Canada Revenue Agency have demonstrated. The finding that satisfaction with the supervisor cohered most tightly with perceived character suggests that standard engagement surveys already collect a useful proxy, and that supervisor-satisfaction items can serve as a diagnostic in performance conversations. Perhaps most provocatively, the serial structure implies that programs targeting engagement, commitment, or retention directly may be fighting an uphill battle while the employee’s daily experience of the manager remains unchanged, making character-focused development and supervisory coaching the most direct investment.

The authors are candid about the study’s boundaries. The sample of 94 is small, limiting the reliability of network centrality rankings, and the research was conducted in a single national context under acute disruption, so generalization requires replication. An alternative reading also remains open: because perceived character and satisfaction with the supervisor share both rater and target, target matching alone could explain why the association concentrated there. Even so, the broader pattern, a densely interconnected character network whose structure resembles that previously reported in Western samples, offers suggestive, though not formally tested, support for the idea that virtue is a recognizable code across cultures. Whether high-demand settings like wartime Ukraine actually amplify the associations of character, the researchers say, is the question their data cannot yet answer, and one that will require comparisons against lower-demand benchmarks in future work.

Subject of Research: How perceived leader character relates to employee work outcomes in a non-WEIRD Ukrainian sample

Article Title: Does character matter in Ukraine? Leader character and employee outcomes in a non-WEIRD context

Article References: Monzani, L., Ruiz Pardo, A. C., & Rozhdestvensky, A. (2026). Does character matter in Ukraine? Leader character and employee outcomes in a non-WEIRD context. Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, 4, Article 1900531. https://doi.org/10.3389/forgp.2026.1900531

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/forgp.2026.1900531

Keywords: leader character, job satisfaction, signaling theory, Ukraine, work engagement, organizational commitment, turnover intention, subjective wellbeing, psychometric network analysis, structural equation modeling, non-WEIRD samples, virtue ethics