The Effect Of Ethical Leadership On Organizational Citizenship Behavior

The numerous social ethical issues such as the ethical crisis of leadership, and business scandals, damaging the organization reputation, and causing the loss of social trust, have raised a huge controversy about the responsible and ethical leadership in management practice and research. Leadership ethics has increased concern of scholars and the general public about ethical issues in business. Previous studies of ethical leadership understand what characterizes ethical leadership from descriptive perspective and moral standard, analysis the source of leadership, the concept of leadership, dimension and relationship with other leadership styles, all of these subjects are what human resource management focus on. Yet little study focus on the influence of leader to employee from social learning perspectives, and explains show the perceived role of ethics and social responsibility affect followers from social exchange theory and social cognition theory. Besides, many foreign researchers do more work about trust; these ideas broaden our understanding about ethical leadership, but lack of integrated study among ethical leadership, organizational trust and Organizational citizenship behavior.This paper firstly reviewed literature about ethical leadership, summarized and analyzed the research questions, and then established a theoretical model based on Social Learning Theory, Social Exchange Theory and Social Cognition Theory. This model described the relationship among ethical leadership, organizational trust and organizational citizenship behavior. Applying mature scales that widely used at home and abroad, the study investigated441employees that come from five domestic manufacturing enterprises to test the hypothesis model. This research used SPSS18.0as the main analytical tool for data analysis and processing. The results show that ethical leadership indeed has a positive impact on employees’organizational citizenship behavior, and organizational trust plays a mediate role in such relationship.Theoretical value of this study is mainly reflected in the following points:(1) Examines the impact of ethical leadership on employees’organizational trust and organizational citizenship behavior based on the Social Learning Theory and Social Exchange Theory;(2) Investigates the mediate mechanism of organizational trust in view of Social Exchange Theory and Cognitive Theory;(3) Respectively discusses how the leadership behavior influence employees’ organizational-oriented and individual-oriented citizenship behavior from two perspectives of organizational level and individual level, broaden the research ideas of organizational behavior. Through in-depth analysis about the relationship mechanisms, the study reveals the nature of the relationship between leadership behavior and employee behavior, and provides another theoretical basis for the relations between leadership and staff.At the same time, this study also has some practical significance as follows:(1) Leadership behavior has a significant impact on the organizational climate and employees’behavior, which provide theoretical basis for organization to culture and select excellent managers;(2) leaders in organization should give attention to moral consciousness and ethical behavior, to create a climate of trust and increase employees’organizational citizenship behavior.