Abstract:
Ethical leadership has gained more importance in covid times calling for enacting
justice. Significance of ethical leadership, justice enactment, and wellbeing of employees
have been highlighted by studies recently. Earlier justice has been focused as an
independent variable which calls for examining the prerequisites leading to justice.
Likewise, the threatened wellbeing of employee in turbulent times like pandemic is
important to study. Therefore, the direct relationship between ethical leadership and
employee wellbeing alongside the mediating role of procedural justice is assessed in this
study. In order to achieve this aim, quantitative approach has been adopted. Attention
drawn by school leadership on ethical leadership, and considering lower wellbeing, lower
salaries, and little to no participation in decision making impacting work in educational
sector (Sutcher et al., 2019), a survey questionnaire was distributed amongst educators in
major cities of Pakistan in which 381 sample size was used to test the model. To test
mediation effect, Process macro model 4 bootstrapped in SPSS was conducted. Series of
confirmatory factor analysis were performed in order to test distinctiveness of variables
under study and the items used to measure those variables.
The study found that there is positive association between ethical leadership and
employee wellbeing. Ethical leadership was also found to be positively related to
procedural justice enactment. The ethical leadership had indirect relation with employee
wellbeing in the presence of procedural justice which shows the successful mediation role
of procedural justice. Educators tend to report lower wellbeing, high stress, lack of
participation in the processes, and high attrition, therefore the knowledge and
understanding developed using these factors will help educational sector to encourage
ethical leadership and enact procedural justice in order to enhance employee wellbeing
particularly in uncertain times. A future suggestion is to study the relationship with
leadership styles other than ethical leadership and with other two components of justice
i.e., distributive justice and interactional justice based on longitudinal research design to
get further insights on the framework.
