Today’s organizations are operating in a highly competitive and changing environment that pushes them to continuously adapt their organizational structures to such environment. However, the success of change initiatives may face a barrier in the response of employees, especially when they lack readiness to change. While leadership can shape the culture of an organization and a culture of effectiveness can help increase employees’ readiness to change, ethical leaders, who serve as a guide and offer support, can also make a difference by reducing uncertainty. Yet existing research on the role of ethical leadership in the enhancement of the employees’ readiness to change is practically non-existent. Far less is the research that analyses the mechanisms that ethical leadership can use to foster employees’ readiness to change. This study aims to investigate whether the ethical leadership of middle–lower echelons influences on employees’ readiness to change positively (H1) and if this relationship is mediated through shaping an organizational culture of effectiveness (H2). Using data from 270 direct reports of middle–lower managers in public foreign trade Egyptian companies, the findings reveal that ethical leadership enhances employees’ readiness to change and that this impact is partially mediated by an organizational culture of effectiveness. Thus, with these findings, new light is shed on the positive role of ethical leadership and the mechanisms it uses to enhance employees’ readiness to change.

Ethics is crucial to professional and academic forensic practice. It is not only essential in achieving justice; but it may also be key to the effectiveness, reliability, speed and efficiency of forensic operations. Ethics has received a great deal of attention in the field of forensic psychology and psychiatry. It has also received attention in the clinical and laboratory practice of forensic medicine. This attention has developed in the aftermath of various cases of unethical forensic practice. Various studies have stressed the importance of the formulation of clinical and professional forensic codes of ethics rather than organizational ones. This paper argues that the implementation of ethical leadership in any forensic organization is critical to the effectiveness, reliability, speed and efficiency of forensic operations. The promotion of clinical ethical practices is a function of top-level ethical leadership. Top-level ethical leaders should be acting as role models responsible for the promotion and implementation of ethics across all organizational levels. This paper proposes a new field of concern within forensic psychology, that is concerned with behavioural reshaping of forensic practitioners across all specialties, from an organizational perspective. The sum of all practitioners' ethical behaviours should trigger to higher reliability, efficiency and effectiveness of forensic operations and processes.

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