Search results

This paper aims to validate a broader conceptualization of ethical leadership and a matching measurement scale (BELS) using survey data from 909 public servants in leadership positions in the Netherlands.

The confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (using AMOS) and exploratory factor analysis were carried out with repeated CFA. A social desirability scale was used to check for model fitness.

Our findings support the notion that ethical leadership is broader in conceptualization and hence reject the theories that limit the role of ethical leaders within the confines of organizations. This study confirms that attributes like sustainability, leadership learning, ethical competency, diversity and resilience are part of ethical leadership. Such characteristics could not be measured with previous scales for ethical leadership. Also, ethical leadership is not separate from associated leadership styles.

A self-assessment scale for leaders was used for this study. Although there is no indication of social desirability bias, future research can also focus on follower assessments of their leaders. This study only focuses on the public sector context only.

Our results suggest that ethical leadership contains more subvalues than in the seminal definition. This study has, therefore, corroborated a broader definition of ethical leadership.

This study indicates the need for ethical leadership to be studied and assessed using a broader conceptualization and measurement scale.

This study will examine the school principals’ ethical decision-making processes and to explore gender-related differences.

This study employed a mixed-method research design, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. Data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews with a sample of 10 male and 10 female principals, who were presented with ethical dilemma scenarios. The qualitative component utilized a phenomenological analysis, while additional quantitative analyses were performed on the same dataset to explore gender-related differences.

Our analysis of principals' ethical evaluations identified three key areas where gender-related differences were evident: decision-making approaches, leadership styles, and philosophy/value orientations. The analysis revealed that women more frequently employed personal approaches, while men favored institutional approaches in their ethical evaluations. Secondly, men tended to adopt a democratic style, while women leaned towards an autocratic style. Finally, men exhibited a relativist orientation, while women displayed an idealist orientation in their ethical decision-making processes.

Gender-based analysis of school principals’ ethical decision-making process has remained an under-researched area. This study contributes to the understanding of gender-related differences in principals’ ethical decision-making processes.

This research mainly aims to test the impact of two leadership styles (ethical and servant leadership) on employee creativity; and to determine whether organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) mediates the relationships between them.

The paper relied on a quantitative research approach with a sample of 213 staff from public universities in the United Arab Emirates. In this paper, the partial least square approach (PLS-SEM) was employed in order to verify the proposed hypotheses.

The outcomes confirmed that OCB has a positive impact on employee creativity. Additionally, the findings indicated that ethical leadership positively affected OCB and employee creativity. It was also confirmed that servant leadership has a significant positive impact on OCB and employee creativity. Finally, the findings revealed that OCB fully mediates the linkages among servant and ethical leadership and employee creativity.

This paper acknowledges the existing gaps in the prior literature, and enables us to understand clearly about the significance of ethical as well as servant leadership in affecting employee creativity via OCB as a mediator.

The roles that one single leadership style plays on motivating employees have been studied. However, in reality, an individual may exhibit more than one type of leadership style. This study aims to reveal how zhongyong leadership can lead to employees’ thriving at work in China, with a glance at ethical leadership as a moderator. The intrinsic motivation of employees is also considered as a mediator to show the specific path that bridges employees’ perceived leadership styles and their thriving at work.

Using three-period data from a sample of 346 employees working in Chinese companies, this study performs regression and bootstrap analyzes in PROCESS macro to test the hypotheses. By adopting the Johnson-Neyman technique, this study further identifies the specific moderating range within which ethical leadership makes a difference.

The positive correlation between zhongyong leadership and employees’ thriving at work only withstand scrutiny when the level of ethical leadership is sufficiently high and employees’ intrinsic motivation plays a mediating role. Specifically, when the ethical leadership level is higher than 6.022 (on a seven-point scale), zhongyong leadership can significantly increase the intrinsic motivation of employees and their thriving at work will be stronger as a result. On the contrary, when ethical leadership is lower than 1.089 (on a seven-point scale), this mediated relationship will head exactly in the opposite direction.

This study focuses on investigating the effects of multiple positive leadership behaviors on promoting employees’ thriving at work. The resultant findings provide compelling evidence for the integration of different leadership styles in practice and consolidate the theoretical underpinnings of related research on thriving at work.

The United Nations Global Compact is a voluntary initiative in four areas as human rights, labor, environment, and anticorruption with 10 universal principles. This network brings corporations, nongovernmental organizations, employees, and people together. There is a need to have responsible and committed leaders to promote good corporate citizenship in the framework of Global Compact. Leaders have a unique position through which they can influence factors concerning organizations’ and employees’ behavior. According to the areas of UN Global Compact, some leadership styles seem to better suit to benefit economies, societies, markets, and people all over the world than the others. By this way, from the theoretical perspectives, the primary purpose of this chapter is to investigate the leader’s behavior and different leadership styles in organizations that are the part of Global Compact platform. There are certain leadership theories – transactional, transformational, sustainable, ethical, and servant – which are examined in Global Compact initiatives.

An extensive literature research is conducted in order to understand the different types of leadership styles while organizations are adapting and understanding the Global Compact principles.

Modern leadership styles especially ethical leadership behavior should be effective to comply with universal principles and organizations can also have commitment to disclose a report with powerful leadership.

However, this research is a theoretical study; for further studies, longitudinal studies can be conducted to understand the leadership styles from the perspective of Global Compact principles, and these different managers’ behaviors can be measured.

This study may be useful for the board of directors and managers since they should participate and adapt themselves to this initiative about how they should behave in the right way.

There is a lack of behavioral studies while analyzing Global Compact principles. Especially examining leadership theories that are complied with these principles will add a value to the literature in this area.

Employee’s service innovative behavior lays the groundwork for bottom-up innovation and ongoing service improvement in service firms. Therefore, it is vital for service organizations to understand the antecedents of employees service innovative behavior. Drawing upon the social cognitive theory, this study aims to develop a research model that examines the effects of ethical and entrepreneurial leadership on service innovative behavior.

Data were collected from 178 managers and 415 employees working in 178 small- and medium-sized (SME) hotels in Vietnam.

The findings showed that ethical leadership has direct and indirect effects on service innovative behavior, while entrepreneurial leadership only influences service innovative behavior via intrinsic motivation. In addition, trust in leader moderates the effect of intrinsic motivation on service innovative behavior

The study advances current scholarly research on leadership by combining the two areas of entrepreneurial and ethical leadership into one theoretical model and examines how these leadership styles generate hospitality employees’ service innovative behavior through the mediating effect of intrinsic motivation and the moderating effect of trust in leader.

The findings of this research offer significant implications for SME hotels and their managers. In their recruitment processes, hotels should search for particular personality traits, which have been found to predict ethical and entrepreneurial leadership. Hospitality firms also need to encourage communication between leaders and co-workers to enhance employees’ intrinsic motivation.

There are calls for research to examine whether both entrepreneurial and ethical leadership styles can be integrated to enhance employees’ positive outcomes. Evidence about the mechanism linking entrepreneurial and ethical leadership to service innovative behavior is limited. With this stated, the current study makes significant contribution to leadership and innovation literature by filling in these voids.

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of ethical leadership on moral motivation of teachers in the schools of Pakistan.

Scenario-based experimental design was used to collect data (N = 174 teachers) from 25 schools in the city of Islamabad. Participants included 156 females and 18 males aged 23–37 years. Ethical leadership was measured at both construct and component levels (moral person and moral manager).

The results found that the moral person component of ethical leadership style heightens the moral identity (internalization)-based moral motivation, while the moral manager component and ethical leadership at construct level style increases moral identity (symbolization)-based moral motivation. Interestingly, in the absence of reward, only the moral person component of ethical leadership style maintained participants’ moral motivation.

The originality of this study lies in highlighting the divergence in ethical leadership style at component level that explains the differences in moral motivation of the teachers.

The main aim of the present study is to discover whether the managers’ self‐evaluations of their ethical leadership style are associated with their assessments of the ethical organisational culture (measured with an eight‐dimensional Corporate Ethical Virtues‐model). It aims to hypothesise that the more ethical the managers evaluate their own leadership style to be, the higher evaluations they give on the ethical culture of their organisation. The underlying assumption is that ethical managers can enhance the ethical culture by behaving in accordance with their own values.

This quantitative research was based on a questionnaire study with 902 respondents throughout Finland. A linear regression analysis was conducted to examine how ethical leadership was related to ethical organisational culture.

Managers who appraised their own leadership style as ethical also evaluated the ethical culture of their organisations more positively. The result implies that an ethically behaving leader can develop the culture of his/her organisation towards more ethical practices. The results also showed that differences in evaluating both ethical leadership and culture emerged concerning background variables.

The data collected were based only on self‐assessments from one data source, and therefore future studies, e.g. including employee ratings, are needed.

Promoting ethical virtues in organisations can lead to a virtuous circle, which supports both ethical culture and ethical leadership.

This empirical study contributes to the research on ethical leadership by examining it in relation to ethical organisational culture.

Motivation constitutes a central topic for business management, because of its critical impact on job performance. Therefore, understanding whether and how the style of leadership adopted by leaders in organizations promotes and maintains employee motivation is of great interest to both scholars and practitioners. Drawing on self-determination theory, this study investigates how ethical and emotional styles of leadership influence employee motivation and thus job performance.

An empirical study was conducted in the public sector in Kuwait. About 607 employees participated in this study. Structural equation modeling techniques were used for testing the causal relationships between constructs.

Results of our study indicate that both ethical and emotional leaderships enhance employee motivation. Furthermore, employee motivation has a positive impact on job performance. The results also show that job performance exerts a negative effect on quitting intentions. Finally, interest in the private sector moderates the job performance–quitting intentions relationship.

These findings provide theoretical contributions to the extant literature, as well as important practical implications for managers.

This study demonstrates the role of both ethical and emotional leaderships in shaping employee behaviors. To the best of our knowledge, this research is among the few that provides initial evidence regarding quitting intentions as an outcome of the impact of ethical and emotional leaderships on employee motivation and individual performance in Kuwait.

Aiming at understanding the effectiveness of leadership styles on workers' outcomes in safety-critical context, this study explores the impact of ethical leadership on safety and task performance under contingent effects of two safety-critical factors (i.e. perceived accident likelihood and perceived hazard exposure).

The study is cross-sectional in nature and survey questionnaire was used for data collection. Data were collected from 397 workers from ten organizations producing chemical products. Multiple hierarchical regression was performed to test the hypothesized relationships.

Results show that ethical leadership has positive association with workers' safety performance, safety attitude and task performance. Further, perceived accident likelihood moderated the influence of ethical leadership on workers' safety performance and attitude in such a way the association is strong when accident likelihood is high. Perceived hazard exposure moderated the link between ethical leadership and task performance such that higher hazard exposure decreases the effectiveness of ethical leadership.

Findings imply that managers can optimize employee safety for jobs associated with high safety-critical context through demonstration of ethical leadership behaviors. The study suggests that ethical leadership can prove to be important tool to improve workers' occupational safety well-being, which in turn helps them to improve their health and general well-being.

Contextualization of ethical leadership in safety-critical context is novelty of the study.