The Impact of Ethical Leadership on Employees’ Behavior: A Theoretical Review of Literature

Abstract

Ethical leadership has emerged over the past two decades as an autonomous construct in organizational behavior research. While several meta-analyses have established the strength of its relationship with employee outcomes, the literature remains fragmented regarding the theoretical frameworks and mechanisms that explain this relationship. This article therefore addresses the following research question: to what extent does a supervisor's ethical conduct influence employees' attitudes and behaviors, and through which mechanisms does this influence operate? To answer it, the article conducts a systematized review following an explicit protocol. Seven publisher and citation databases were searched using a query combining the construct with employees' observable behaviors. A purposive selection of the most central works in the field, subject to four cumulative inclusion criteria including the verification of references at the source, led to twenty-two works, including thirteen primary empirical studies and three meta-analyses. Each work was then coded along four dimensions: type of work, theoretical framework, level of analysis, and class of behavior. The results show that Social Learning Theory, Social Exchange Theory, and Social Identity Theory explain this influence, which is transmitted through ethical climate, trust in the supervisor, and moral identity to employees' behaviors and organizational commitment. The literature converges on the existence of a positive relationship but remains constrained by four limitations: challenges of causal inference, the predominance of cross-sectional self-reported measures, conceptual overlap with related leadership styles, and insufficiently established cross-cultural validity. The article proposes an integrative model and a research agenda.

Classification JEL : M12 ; M14 ; M54 ; D23.

Paper Type : Theoretical research.