TY - JOUR AB - Purpose Organizations with committed employees create a sustainable high-performance and stable environment over the long term. Leadership should be a key component determining organizational commitment. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between ethical leadership and its association to employee commitment.Design/methodology/approach A quantitative method was chosen for this study because the objective was to correlate variables and predict a set of outcomes. Employees from 13 commercial banks listed in Amman Stock Exchange completed a survey designed to gather their perceptions of study variables.Findings The results show that there is a positive and significant relationship between ethical leadership and two components of organizational commitment, namely, affective commitment and normative commitment. Additionally, the results show that there is no relationship between ethical leadership and continuous commitment.Research limitations/implications The study was conducted in the banking sector of Jordan. Therefore, the results may not generalize to other sectors. Additionally, this study might have self-selection and non-response bias. This occurs when the entities in the sample are given a choice to participate. If a set of members in the sample decides not to participate, it reduces the ability to generalize the results to the entire population.Practical implications Managers should strive to enhance the levels of both affective and normative commitment in their organizations and that the ethical leadership of managers plays a significant role in developing employees and ethical organizational cultures.Originality/value To date, there has been little empirical research regarding the relationship between ethical leadership and its influence on organizational commitment, and, as such, this study has been beneficial in its contribution to the early body of knowledge of ethical leaderships which provides confirmatory evidence about a significant effect that perceived ethical leadership has on organizational. VL - 34 IS - 3 SN - 2054-6246 DO - 10.1108/JEAS-01-2018-0006 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/JEAS-01-2018-0006 AU - Abuzaid Ahmad Nasser PY - 2018 Y1 - 2018/01/01 TI - The relationship between ethical leadership and organizational commitment in banking sector of Jordan T2 - Journal of Economic and Administrative Sciences PB - Emerald Publishing Limited SP - 187 EP - 203 Y2 - 2024/09/24 ER -