Identifying Components and providing a Model of Ethical Leadership in the university (Study: Islamic Azad University)

The existence of moral dilemmas are one of the most important reasons why organizations have been implementing ethical leadership; therefore, ethical leadership is one of the major concerns and issues of today's organizations, to the extent that scientific flourishing, industrial progress, and social affluence is affiliated with ethics in organizations.

In terms of the purpose, the present study is applied research and it was carried out in two quantitative and qualitative phases. In the first phase of the research, the used research method is the type of analysis of the subject based on the inductive approach (data-based). In the second phase the present study has described the objective, realistic and regular characteristics of a subject and is a descriptive survey. The researcher identified and selected a list of the first articles that appeared to contain data relevant to the research objectives by using the books written in the field of higher education with a focus on ethical leadership and management, to better identify relevant issues related to the subject of research. By careful examination, a total of 250 Themes were identified in 24 documents. The statistical population in the second part of the study included all subject specialists in Azad universities of the country; 303 were sampled. In order to evaluate the content analysis, the "use of independent coders and experts group" was used. Using of independent coding is a common process for evaluating and controlling the quality of the analysis of the subject. In the quantitative section, content validity and face validity were used to assess the validity.

the content was identified in the form of a closed-ended questionnaire whose content validity was approved by experts through the CVR of 8 panelists. The reliability of the information gathering tool was higher than 0.7 in convergent validity and higher than 0.8 in combined reliability by Cronbach's alpha. For analyzing data, a second-order factor analysis was used in quantitative section. The results, in quantitative section, show that ethical leadership load factors fitted with the themes of action, ability, foresight, character, and ethical knowledge with greater than 0.9 and it fitted with ethical attitude with higher than 0.8 at 0.001 and above the critical value.

The results of this study showed that ethical leaders in Azad universities have ethical action, foresight, character, attitude, knowledge and ability. These individuals, while being an ethical strategist and diplomat, are observant, pragmatic, opportunist, listener, transformative, supportive, and capitalist. In addition, they must have values like conductivity, worldview, justice, law-order, value –oriented, benevolence. In large organizations such as Azad University, ethical leadership can be seen with having good attributes and correct values and being rich in terms of performance.