Impact Of Ethical Leadership on Work Engagement Via Perceived Organizational Politics; Moderating Role of Locus of Control
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56976/rjsi.v5i2.114Abstract
Around 88 percent of the managers across the globe reported that politics, an endemic phenomenon exists in their organizations and around 87 percent employees are not completely engaged at work. Considering these emergent issues, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of ethical leadership on work engagement through perceived organizational politics, while considering locus of control as moderator in the association between perceived organizational politics and work engagement. This paper utilized a cross-sectional survey research design from 500 supervisor-supervisee dyads in both private and public service sectors of Lahore. Confirmatory factor analysis validated the dimensionality as well as reliability of the measurement model. Furthermore, the hypothesized associations were analyzed through two-staged structural equation modeling. Results revealed that perceived organizational politics mediates the association between ethical leadership and work engagement. In addition, locus of control was found to moderate the association between perceived organizational politics and work engagement. This paper did not establish any causal inferences between the constructs, therefore explanation pertinent to findings must be provided with great caution. This paper suggests practical inferences through mitigation of damaging effects of perceived organizational politics, a prevailing issue with deleterious outcomes and yet not addressed in Asian societies organizations. It emphasizes on organizations to recruit and train individuals with ethical behaviors that may help avoid employees’ negative perceptions, resulting in increased employees’ work engagement. This study extends the existent literature through examining perceived organizational politics (POP) as a mediating mechanism between ethical leadership and work engagement. It sheds light on the personality, politics as a psychological state with its outcomes, along with the cultural dimension for the first time in literature and explains the phenomena through which negative effects of (POP) are buffered by ethical leadership while in presence of individual differences that ameliorate or deteriorate the organizational outcomes. The theoretical framework is progressed through social learning theory and COR theory.
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Copyright (c) 2023 Aniqa Gill, Rizwan Qaiser Danish, Muhammad Ramzan
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