Impact Of Ethical Leadership On Followers' Work Attitudes:An Evidence From Chinese Public Sector Organizations

The impact of ethics on recent leadership practices has assumed a prominent role in both practical and theoretical discussions of organizational leadership successes and failures.Early twenty-first century scandals involving large corporations such as Arthur Andersen,Enron,HealthSouth,Tyco,WorldCom,and Toyota demonstrate that the concept of ethical leadership is a timely and relevant topic for study.Leaders strive to achieve organizational goals by encouraging employees to perform at high levels.A leader's ability to affect followers' attitudes and behaviors is important in this pursuit because it can result in greater job performance.Ethical leadership may provide an effective approach for fostering positive employee outlooks and actions.The ethical leader,as a moral person and a moral manager,is an attractive and trustworthy role model.Employees respond positively to the ethical leader's principled leadership,altruism,empowerment,and reward systems,suggesting that improved employee attitudes and work-related behaviors may follow.This study aims to investigate the effect of ethical leadership on employee attitudes(affective commitment and job satisfaction)and to examine the role of psychological empowerment as a potential mediator of these relationships.In total,467 employees in Chinese public sector completed surveys across three separate waves.Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling(SEM)were used to test hypotheses.The study found a positive relationship between ethical leadership and both employee attitudes and further reveals that psychological empowerment fully mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and affective commitment while partially mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and job satisfaction.Testing of the above relationships via a mediated approach is novel and contributes to the research on ethical leadership.