Ethical Leadership as prerequisite for Procedural Justice Enactment and its ultimate impact on Employee Well-being during ongoing COVID-19 pandemic

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.