How Ethical Leadership Shapes Employees’ Readiness to Change: The Mediating Role of an Organizational Culture of Effectiveness

Abstract

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.

Transformational Leadership, Ethical Leadership, and Participative Leadership in Predicting Counterproductive Work Behaviors: Evidence From Financial Technology Firms

“…First, further research should examine the proposed model of the present study in different countries to increase the generalization. For example, the culture of effectiveness (Metwally et al, 2019) may influence the theoretical model in the present research (e.g., ethical leadership, and its outcomes) and the present research encourages other researchers to test the effect of cultures of effectiveness to increases the generalization of the present research Second, further research should explore different antecedent of EE in different contexts to advance the literature of EE because different antecedents should be considered in different contexts. Finally, the common method variance cannot be eliminated because of the self-rating questionnaire and the present research suggests a new measurement method should be employed in handling this problem, such as the eye-tracking technique (Holmqvist et al, 2011).…”

How Upper/Middle Managers' Ethical Leadership Activates Employee Ethical Behavior? The Role of Organizational Justice Perceptions Among Employees

“…Malaysia is known for its extremely “high power” distance compared to the US and other Western cultural contexts (Hofstede Center, 1967–2010 ). Malaysia is also a country where Islam is predominant (Weintraub, 2011 ), a religion on which ethical leadership research is still not abundant (Metwally et al, 2019 ). Thus, by demonstrating the positive effect of ethical leadership on employee ethical behavior via organizational justice, and the stronger mediation size effect of interpersonal and informational justice dimensions in such a relationship, this study helps give robustness to the theory of ethical leadership and its outcomes across national cultural geographies.…”

“…While an ethical climate has been addressed as the best mechanism underlying the ethical leadership-employee ethical behavior relationship (Schminke et al, 2005), ethical leadership could shape other aspects that play an important role in this relationship. In addition to providing ethical guidance, ethical leaders are fair (Ko et al, 2018;Metwally et al, 2019), which entails important aspects such as transparency, balanced decision-making, and giving fair and equal treatment to others (Metwally et al, 2019). Given that leaders are perceived as representatives of the organization (Hou et al, 2018), especially if they occupy upper or middle management positions, the practice of ethical leadership should make employees perceive their organization as fair; in turn, according to social exchange theory (SET, Blau, 1964), employees may become eager to reciprocate (to the leader and the organization that the leader represents) with positive, valuable behaviors (Ko et al, 2018), such as ethical behavior.…”

Healthcare leadership ethics: Time for some formal training

“…[12][13][14] A highly moral culture positively affects organizational reputation, brand value, favourable media presence, and political status, which, in turn, affect talent acquisition, donations, patient perspectives, and effectiveness in advocating for funding. [15][16][17][18] At the frontlines, the morality of the organizational culture also affects employee behaviour around sick time and fraud, and ethical leadership is also positively correlated with perception of patient safety culture and organizational commitment. 19 When doing the "right" thing is not the obvious answer Some have argued that simply focusing on doing the right thing should be sufficient 20 ; however, the "right" thing is seldom easy to discern in these complex, multi-stakeholder situations.…”