The Ethical Leadership - Occupational Stress Relationship: A literature review

Abstract

Researches have always affirmed that occupational stress is a phenomenon that is part of the daily life of men and women in the workplace. This stress can be caused by a variety of factors that are either related to the work, the context or the individual.

In fact, given the strong presence of these multiple factors in today's work environment, organizations will always continue to produce stress, therefore they are obliged, as well as their managers, to find ways to reduce the negative effects that this perceived stress can have on employees (Zhang & Lee, 2010).

Among the responses proposed by researchers in this regard, we find leadership, as it is recognized as having the ability to play a key role in influencing desired organizational outcomes by serving as a means to achieve them.

Furthermore, particular attention has turned to ethical leadership, given the set of positive traits and behaviors that these leaders demonstrate towards their employees, as well as a good amount of professional outcomes, including ethical behavior, job performance, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction (Bedi et al., 2016).

Through our classic literature review, we seek, on the one hand, to synthesize previous work on the various interactions between ethical leadership and stress in the workplace, and in the other hand to shed light on the theoretical links discussed by various researchers, with a view to providing a general framework for this relationship, and then to highlight the conditions under which ethical leadership can play a role in managing stress in the workplace.

Keywords : Ethical leadership, Stress, Occupational stress.

JEL Classification : M10, O15

Paper type : Theoretical Research