Designing and testing a model of organizational outcomes of ethical leadership

Today, the ethical leadership has important effect on performance of knowledge-based organizations. On the other hand, organizational identification and organizational trust as mediator variables, facilitate the relationship between ethical leadership and performance of organizations. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of ethical leadership on task performance and organizational creativity with mediating role of organizational identification and organizational trust. The participants consisted of 204 employees of Jahad Agricultural Organization of Khuzestan that were selected by stratified random sampling method. The instruments that were used in this study include: Ethical leadership questionnaire of Brown, Treviño, & Harrison (2005), job performance scale of Williams & Anderson (1991), organizational identification scale of Kreiner & Ashforth (2004), organizational trust Questionnaire of Schoorman & Ballinger (2006), and organizational creativity scale of Ganesan and Weitz (2004). Fitness of the proposed model and indirect effects was examined through structural equation modeling and bootstrap procedure. Findings indicated that the proposed model fit the data properly. The results also indicated that ethical leadership directly and with mediating role of organizational identification and organizational trust had impact on task performance, and also with mediating role of organizational identification had impact on organizational creativity. This research suggests that there need to provide conditions to promote ethical leadership, organizational identification and organizational trust to increase task performance and organizational creativity.