Studying the effect of Ethical Leadership on Organizational Silence, Voice and Employee's Performance

Employee's opinions and ideas are valuable sources for managers’ decision making. Thus, the proper conditions should be provided in organization so that employees could easily express their views and provide their useful ideas for solving organization problems. To create this situation, we should identify influencing factors. Therefore, this paper examines the relationships between ethical leadership, organizational voice, silence and employees’ performance. First, these variables are described and in the following, hypotheses are presented according to the literature. To explore hypotheses, data were collected from university of Guilan employees using questionnaires. For data analysis we used exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. According to exploratory factor analysis, prosocial, defensive and acquiescent voice were identified as dimensions of organizational voice and prosocial, defensive and acquiescent silence were identified as dimensions of organizational silence. The results confirm the influence of ethical leadership on organizational silence and voice and the influence of organizational silence and voice on employee performance.