Spiritual Leadership, Ethical, and Philanthropic Citizenship, Mediated by Professional Moral Courage

Abstract

In recent years, organizations have witnessed a formidable shift in employees’ behaviors deeply rooted in a negatively charged work environment. This initiates a need for spiritual leadership to address organizational vice and challenges associated to employees’ behavior. These behaviors subsequently reflect in employees’ work outcomes and conform a penultimate connection of personal, environmental and behavioral factors. With this premise, our study encompasses an integrated framework of social cognitive theory and spiritual leadership theory to test the impact of spiritual leadership on employees’ ethical and philanthropic citizenship behaviors through a mediating channel of professional moral courage. Data for this study is collected from four higher educational institutes (N = 320) with scales which are found reliable and valid for this context. Findings show that observed data fits the hypothesized model and conforms to criteria of model fit indices. The significance and effect size of the results indicate distinctive incremental variance in the dependent variables of ethical and philanthropic citizenship of behavior and proved the intervening effect of professional moral courage. The theoretical and practical implications along with future research directions are discussed subsequently.