The Impacts of the Ethical Leadership on the Workplace Spirituality and Organizational Citizenship Behavior : Focused on the Social Enterprise

Jeong-Gee, Seo
Department of Business Administration
Graduate School of Business Administration
Pukyong National University


Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, the role of Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR) has become a hot issue in business world due to increasing comparative importance of firms in current society. This tendency brought about a surge in the social contribution of firms around the globe. As leaders in these firms started to realize the critical role that social contribution played in improving a firm''s image in the community, they began to place more emphasis on ethical leadership as a means for fostering social contributions in business settings.
The purpose of this research is to analyze empirically the relationship among ethical leadership, workplace spirituality, and organizational citizenship behavior and also to analyze the moderating effects of Leader-Member Exchange(LMX) on the relationship between workplace spirituality and organizational citizenship behavior.
The specific purposes of the research are to figure out as follows;
first, the effects of ethical leadership on workplace spirituality, second, the effects of workplace spirituality on organizational citizenship behavior, third, the mediation effects of workplace spirituality on the relationship between ethical leadership and organizational citizenship behavior, and forth, the moderating effects of LMX on the relationship between workplace spirituality and organizational citizenship behavior.
For these purposes, a questionnaire survey was carried out to the employees of social enterprises in Korea, and 552 data were collected. This data is analyzed by the SPSS 21.0.
The results of this research can be summarized like below.
First, the result shows that ethical leadership affects the workplace spirituality positively. It means that all the sub-factors of the ethical leadership variable, such as transparency, contribution, and integrity, have significantly positive effects on the sub-factors of workplace spirituality variable, such as inner life and sense of community.
Second, the result shows that workplace spirituality generally affects organizational citizenship behavior positively. It means that the sub-factors of the workplace spirituality variable, such as inner life and sense of community, have significantly positive effects on all the sub-factors except for altruism of organizational citizenship behavior.
Third, it shows that workplace spirituality plays a role as a partial mediation factor in the relationship between ethical leadership and organizational citizenship behavior.
Fourth, the result shows that LMX plays on a moderating role on the relationship between the factor of workplace spirituality, sense of community and organizational citizenship behavior. It means when the interaction between leaders and their employees is active, organizational citizenship behavior is also active.
Finally, based on the results of the empirical analysis, several implications and future studies to deal with are discussed.