The Content Of The Ethical Leadership Structure And Its Impact On Employee Advice Behavior: Psychological Empowerment And Mediating Role Of Psychological Safety

In both the management practice and the academic community, there has been a surge in interest in the ethical leadership. The study used some standard research methods such as literature review, interview and survey investigation, in order to explore the content structure of ethical leadership and the mechanism of ethical leadership impacted voice behavior.600 employees in Chinese enterprise were surveyed through the questionnaire, such statistics as exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, correlation analysis, regression analysis, and structural equation modeling were applied for the data analysis. The conclusions were drawn as followings:First, in context of Chinese culture, ethical leadership is comprised of five dimensions, they are justice, integrity, concern, morality and normalization. The reliability and validity of ethical leadership questionnaire which contains 20 items reaches psychometric requirements.Secondly, correlation analysis indicated that, ethical leadership, psychological empowerment, psychological safety and voice behavior of employees were correlated significantly with each other. Regression analysis indicated that, morality and justice of ethical leadership were significantly positive predictors of psychological empowerment; morality, integrity and concern of ethical leadership were significantly positive predictors of psychological safety; morality, concern and integrity of ethical leadership were significantly positive predictors of voice behavior.Thirdly, preliminary studies indicated that, psychological empowerment partially mediated the relationship of ethical leadership with voice behavior; psychological safety partially mediated the relationship of ethical leadership with voice behavior. Deeply, psychological empowerment and psychological safety together fully mediated the relationship of ethical leadership with voice behavior, psychological empowerment partially mediated the relationship of ethical leadership with psychological safety; psychological safety partially mediated the relationship of psychological empowerment with voice behavior.In sum, the results suggested the conclusion that, the ethical leadership questionnaire in this study had perfect reliability and validity, which is useful for the Chinese ethical leadership study. Ethical leadership impacted voice behavior through the fully mediating effect of psychological empowerment and psychological safety.