Designing and Testing a Model of the Relationship of Ethical Leadership to Organizational Citizenship and Counterproductive Work Behaviors: Mediating Role of Organizational Trust

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between promotion-focused and prevention-focused ethical leadership to organizational citizenship and counterproductive work behaviors with the mediating role of the organizational trust. For this purpose, 180 stratified randomly selected employees participated in the study. Participants completed promotion-focused and Prevention-focused ethical leadership (Bush et al., 2020), organizational trust (Yoo & kanawattanachai, 2002), organizational citizenship behavior (Organ & Kanofsky, 1989) counterproductive work behavior (Bennett & Robinson, 2002) questionnaires. Structural equation modeling (SEM) through AMOS-23 was used to assess the proposed model's fit indices and path coefficient. The bootstrap procedure by Preacher and Hayes (2008) was used for testing the mediation effect. Fit indices indicated a very good fit of the model with the data. Path coefficients showed that the promotion-focused Ethical Leadership (0.54) positivity and prevention-focused Ethical Leadership (-0.31) negativity has an effect on organizational trust and organizational trust has an effect on organizational citizenship behavior (0.51) and counterproductive work behavior (-0.47). Also, the results showed that the promotion-focused Ethical Leadership had a positive indirect effect on citizenship behavior through organizational trust and Prevention-focused Ethical Leadership had a positive indirect effect on counterproductive work behavior through organizational trust. We explored how these different types of ethical leadership may indirectly, through felt trust, impact citizenship behavior and counterproductive work behavior. Given the importance of ethical decision-making in organizations and the calls for increased ethical leadership, our findings have important implications for theory and practice.