Identifying the Relationship between Ethical Leadership and Work Attitude of University Teachers: The Mediating Role of Trust

Abstract

It has been widely observed that the role of leaders is paramount in developing the working environment within the organization, where ethics, working attitudes, and trust are key to running the organization efficiently. Building on this, the current research was planned to study the relationship between leaders’ ethical leadership, teachers’ working attitude and the mediating role of trust. Teachers were asked to report about their leaders’ (chairpersons/heads) ethical leadership. A quantitative survey was conducted by adopting descriptive research approach. Four public universities were scrutinized on a convenient basis. From these universities, 332 teachers were selected through a simple random sampling technique. Existing research tools were adopted to collect data. Data analyses were done using the statistical software SPSS to reach to certain findings. Two research hypotheses were presented to analyze the results. After calculating the descriptive statistics, simple linear regression and an independent sample t-test were applied to infer findings. The findings show that ethical leadership has a significant relationship with teachers’ working attitude and teachers' trust in their leaders. Our second research hypothesis was not accepted as we could not detect the difference in the opinion of male and female teachers in view of ethical leadership, teachers’ work attitude and trust. We also stressed the limitations and presented directions for future research.