The Relationship between Ethical Leadership and Whistle Blowing with the Mediating Role of Work-Related Stress and the Moderating Role of Interactional Justice

 Whistle blowing is a new and important issue which needs organizations special attention in order to increase organizational health. Ignoring it can create many problems, which shows the importance and the necessity of this study. The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between ethical leadership and whistle blowing with the mediating role of work-related stress and the moderating role of interactional justice.

 The present study is descriptive-communicative research. The study tools consisted of the Ethical Leadership Questionnaire, the Whistle Blowing Scale, stress questionnaire and the Interactional Justice Scale. The study was conducted in the winter of 2022 and the sample consisted of 153 health system employees in Fars Province. To analyze the findings through 3 main hypotheses, structural equation method and Smart PLS 3 software were used.

Ethical Considerations:

 In this research, the principles of research ethics have been observed through maintaining the publishing rules and the participants’ privacy, as well as committing to use the collected data only for appropriate and ethical purposes.

 The research findings showed that there is a positive and significant relationship between ethical leadership and whistle blowing at the level of 65% with the significance less than 0.0001. Furthermore, this relationship will be positively strengthened by the presence of interactive justice. Other findings also indicated that ethical leadership reduces stress in employees (with the significance less than 0.0001) and this reduction in stress levels can increase the level of whistle blowing (with the significance less than 0.0001), which confirms the mediating role of stress.

 Considering the findings as well as the importance and the sensitivity of the health system, besides creating safe and appropriate paths, it is necessary to pay more attention to its psychological and managerial aspects such as ethical leadership and interactive justice in order to reduce violations in medical organizations. Individual factors such as work-related stress are also necessary to be taken into consideration by senior managers and planners.