Leader Personality Traits and Organizational Citizenship Behavior with the Combined Mediating Role of Ethical & Servant Leadership, and the Work Group Psychology: Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract

Different patterns of leadership were previously established empirically, however, many of them were conceptually interrelated and pursued simultaneously, while their overall effect remained poorly understood. We proposed a theoretical framework by combining (F. O. Walumbwa &Schaubroeck, 2009) and (Newman, Schwarz, Cooper, & Sendjaya, 2017) models of two closely related leadership styles i.e. Ethical and Servant leadership. Different leadership personality traits like Pro-activeness, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism were analyzed and their effect on Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB), and Voice were established with the mediatory role of both ethical and servant leadership. These leadership styles would then impact workgroup psychology, and ultimately OCB. The workgroup factors included were Leader-Member Exchange, Psychological Safety, and empowerment. This model was empirically tested on a sample of 201 employees working in large organizations (450 or more employees) in Karachi, Pakistan. The data was collected with the use of adopted questionnaire and analyzed using Confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation modeling. The results suggested that leadership personality traits that include proactive personality, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism make leaders either “Ethical leaders” or “Servant leaders. In both cases of ethical and servant leaders, leaders lead their way of dealing with member exchange, psychological safety and psychological empowerment affect voice behavior and organizational citizenship behavior. Ethical leaders develop an ethical workplace culture that allows employees to make innovative suggestions and become a constructive asset for the organization. This is because Ethical leaders make their voices heard publicly against any negative organizational practice and emphasize doing the right thing from a social learning perspective.