Ethical Leadership and Employee Engagement in Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: Exploring the role of Power Distance and Trust in Leadership

The purpose of the present study was to examine the influence of perceived ethical leadership on employee engagement in organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) at work. A secondary purpose of this study was to investigate the factors that may influence the relationship between ethical leadership and employee engagement in OCBs at work. It was proposed that employees high in power distance value orientation, will follow an ethical leader’s role modeled behavior more, due to the principle of social learning theory and therefore engage in more organizational citizenship behaviors than employees low in power distance. Additionally, the role of trust in leaders as mediating variable to explain the relationship between ethical leadership and employee engagement in OCBs was examined. Twenty-nine employee and suspervisor dyads completed online questionnaires which measured employee perceptions of ethical leadership, employee’s self-rated power distance orientation, and supervisor ratings of employee engagement in OCBs. Overall results did not indicate support for the proposed relationships. However, these findings may not indicate that these relationships do not exist in organizations. Limitations in the study such as insufficient power and cultural discrepencies may have been confounding variable. Furture research may benefit from addressing the current study limitations, identifying other variables, such as affective or cognitive trust, which may impact the relationship between ethical leadership and employee engagement in OCBs