The importance of Ethics and Ethical Leadership in Public Sector Accountants

Even accountants had involved to recently widespread corruption and financial scandals occurred for instance in Iran. This issue made a doubt on codes of ethic in accounting profession and therefore it stained accounting firm reputation accordingly. This paper examined an ethic leadership model and its effect on leadership effectiveness in accounting.

This study is a descriptive survey. The statistical community sample included the staff of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz Public Hospitals, Shiraz Medical Science Faculty and Shiraz Municipality. Data was gathered by means of questionnaires and analyzed by structured equation modeling method.

The results indicated that the staff’s perception of the leader’s ethics had positive and significant effect on leadership effectiveness. Also, staff expectance and preference for ethical leadership did not moderate the relationship between perceiving leader’s ethical behavior and leader effectiveness. Furthermore, perceived organizational ethical leadership by staff did not moderate the relationship between perceived ethical leader manners and leader effectiveness, as well.

If leaders have ethical behavior, they will be considered as more efficient leaders in the eyes of their superiors and subordinates. Ethical leadership plays an important role in predicting and explaining the effectiveness of the leader. Establishing a relationship between ethical leadership behaviors and leader effectiveness may motivate companies and accounting professionals to pay more attention to ethical leadership behaviors.