The Effect of Ethical Leadership and Leadership Styles on Organizational Commitment in a Military Health Organization in Tehran, Iran

Ethical leadership, as one of the new approaches to leadership, embraces management and leadership methods in which the rights and dignity of the employees are valued and respected as human beings. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of ethical leadership and leadership styles on organizational commitment in a military health organization in Tehran.
This cross-sectional study is conducted in Tehran, Iran in 2016. The study population consisted of employees of a selected military health organization, selected by stratified and simple random sampling method. For data collection, the standard questionnaire of Brown's ethical leadership scale (three-part model of staff), Bass & Avolio’s multi-factor questionnaire and organizational commitment questionnaire of Meyer and Allen have been used. The descriptive data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and SPSS 16.0 software and for analyzing the relationship between components, structural equation modeling and AMOS 18.0 software were used.
The results showed that the average organizational commitment in the sample was 71.6±4.9 at a high level. Also, the highest score of organizational commitment in the staff was related to the dimension of normative commitment. Regarding the leadership style, the results showed that the dominant leadership style was the transformational and transactional leadership style, respectively. In the case of ethical leadership, the results showed that the average score of leadership style of managers was 36.8±6.89 from the perspective of the employee. The fitting results of the model showed that the independent variables predicted 22 percent of the changes in the dependent variables of organizational commitment.
Considering the high score of organizational commitment at the university, it can be concluded that the use of ethical leadership and transformational leadership style has been effective and has a direct effect on employee's commitment. Ethical leadership in this organization, by establishing ethical relationships (interpersonal relationships) and seriousness in addressing ethics in the organization, has added to the organization's commitment. Therefore, managers with knowledge of the amount and type of commitment of employees can be used to improve and increase the performance of employees in order to achieve organizational and social goals as well as personal goals of the employees.