The Nexus of Ethical Leadership, Job Performance, and Turnover Intention: The Mediating Role of Job Satisfaction

Bashir Ahmad,Masood N. Kalyar,Imran Shafique

doi:10.7906/indecs.16.1.5

Abstract

This study aims to examine the impact of ethical leadership on employees' job satisfaction, job performance, and turnover intention. A conceptual framework is developed which integrates job satisfaction as a mediating mechanism in explaining the nexus among ethical leadership, employee job performance, and turnover intention. The proposed model is tested by using the data collected from a sample (n = 196) of tourist companies in Pakistan. The results reveal that ethical leadership has a positive effect on employees' job satisfaction, job performance and negative effect on employees' turnover intentions. Further, job satisfaction mediates the effect of ethical leadership on employees' job performance and turnover intentions. The findings recommend that the demonstration of ethical leadership behaviours by managers at the workplace increases the likelihood of employees' job satisfaction and performance, while reducing their intention to leave the job. This study elucidates that, in Pakistani tourism sector, ethical leadership plays a key role in achieving performance goals. Future research could analyse the said nexus in different sectors and across different cultures while considering other measures of individual performance. The originality of this study is theorizing as well as empirically testing the intervening mechanism of job satisfaction in probing the linkages among ethical leadership, job performance, and turnover intention in Pakistani workplace context.

Highlights

Ethical leadership is an imperative element for organizations because it helps organizations to decrease business expenditures through fair and moral treatment of its employees as well as other resources [1]
This study responds to the calls that ask for investigation of ethical leadership and employee job outcomes nexus through a mechanism as it considers employee job satisfaction as a mediating mechanism to study the aforementioned linkages
The findings have proved that majority of the hypotheses is accepted, this study contributes to the crosscultural validity of the ethical leadership, employees’ job satisfaction, performance and turnover intention research

Summary

Introduction

Ethical leadership is an imperative element for organizations because it helps organizations to decrease business expenditures through fair and moral treatment of its employees as well as other resources [1]. Ample research has investigated the positive role of ethical leadership in lessening the destructive behaviours of employees and to discourage immoral workplace practices [2, 3]. Relatively less attention has been paid to probe the nexus of ethical leadership, employees’ job performance [4,5,6] and their intention to leave the organization [7]. There are only few studies that considered social learning context of Brown, Treviño, and Harrison [8] as an influential model to explain how and why ethical leadership links and affects employee job performance [9]. The primary assumption of this model suggests that ethical leader affect employees’ behaviours through role modelling. E.g. advocating the ethics and compensating employees on the basis of ethical agreements, ethical leader as a role model can inspire employees not to indulge in such behaviours which can harm their job performance [4, 8]

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Discussion

Conclusion