How Ethical Leadership Shapes Employees' Readiness to Change

Organizations must continuously adapt to compete in today's changing business environment. However, employees tend to resist change viewing it as a threat. When organizations need to change, employees need to be ready for it, a concept known as individual readiness. Employees are less resistant to change when they perceive their leaders are trustworthy and have "faith in their intentions. This resource points out how ethical leadership can aid employees when undertaking change initiatives. The research analyzes the mechanisms that ethical leaders can use.

Materials and Methods

Sample and Procedure

To test the hypotheses, three of the largest public foreign trade organizations in Egypt were considered. After obtaining the approval of their general managers, questionnaires were randomly distributed to a sample of 357 employees who directly reported to middle and lower-level managers in these three organizations. The sample size was calculated by randomly selecting one employee for each leader and following recommendations regarding the amount of data to collect on each organization to obtain a representative sample. Participation was voluntary and the data were collected in two rounds. In the first round, employees assessed the ethical leadership of their direct managers and the extent to which an organizational culture of effectiveness was present in the organization. A second round, 4 weeks later, measured their own readiness to change using employees' own scores. Data were collected in Arabic to guarantee an accurate interpretation of all questions. Scales were, consequently, translated into the Arabic language prior to data collection using the back-translation method, and this method revealed no significant differences between the English and Arabic versions of the scales. For the purposes of the current investigation, data from temporary employees who had been working for <1 year with their current organizations were excluded. In the end, 270 usable surveys were obtained, with a response rate of 75.63%, which is quite high considering the sensitivity of the ethical content of the research and given that various departments were surveyed. Table 1 shows the demographics of the study sample.

Table 1

TABLE 1. Sample characteristics.

A cover letter emphasized that there were no right or wrong answers. Although each questionnaire included an identification code, anonymity, and absolute confidentiality were guaranteed (respondents did not have to reveal their names, their jobs, or the organizations they worked for). Finally, two steps specifically sought to mitigate common method bias: (1) temporal separation in the questionnaire between predictors (ethical leadership, organizational culture of effectiveness) and criterion variables (employees' readiness to change); and (2) survey items that were simple, specific, and concise, according to the pilot test results.