Ethical leadership and change: A qualitative comparative case study in selected Malaysian transformed schools

Abstract

Leaders' ethical behaviours and conducts are prerequisites for an effective change. The purpose of this qualitative comparative case study was to explore ethical leadership practices in selected transformed schools from Selangor, Malaysia. Two schools (a primary school and a secondary school) were selected as study sites. Data were collected through interviews, observations, and document reviews. Interviews were conducted with 28 participants including school heads (2), school administrators (3 þ 3 ¼ 6) and schoolteachers (10 þ 10 ¼ 20) selected from both schools using purposive sampling. The constant comparative analysis method was used to analyse the data. Analysis revealed demonstration of friendly and trusting relationships, openness to school members, professional commitment, acting as role model, and warranting ethically appropriate conducts as important ethical leadership practices. This study has value for policy and practice pertaining to school transformation; the implications, strengths and limitations of the study and recommendations for future research have been discussed as well.

How ethical leadership influences creativity and organizational innovation

“…Second, current literature on ethical leadership fails to provide concrete understanding of its potential role in fostering organizational innovation. When comparing with other leadership styles and firm outcomes linkages, the existing literature on ethical leadership focuses on few aspects of firm-level outcomes such as firm reputation (Zhu et al , 2014), firm performance (Wang et al , 2017), organizational change (Waheed et al , 2018), corporate social responsibility (Pasricha et al , 2018; Wu et al , 2015) and organizational innovativeness (Pučėtaitė, 2014). The perspective of organizational innovation is unaddressed with exception of Pučėtaitė’s (2014) work, the only study as per our knowledge, that investigated the role of ethical leadership on organizational innovativeness (firm capacity to innovate) in the Lithuanian context and found ethical leadership as an important predictor of innovativeness.…”

Orientations of Leadership Behaviours Required for School Transformation and Change

“…Ethical-oriented leadership is also an important leadership behaviour orientation along with change-oriented, relation-oriented and taskoriented leadership behaviours as suggested by Michel et al (2010). Waheed et al (2019) while exploring the role of ethical-oriented leadership in school transformation found that ethical-oriented behaviours of school leaders contributed to the school transformation of Malaysian selected transformed schools.…”

The relationship between principals’ perceptions of school practices and student achievement in science: The implicit ethical meaning of the TIMSS

“…They often confront tasks related to ethical questions (Hammersley-Fletcher, 2015). For example, they deal with problems that arise when their staff members do not conduct themselves in accordance with ethical principles (Dennis et al, 2019; Waheed et al, 2018). These leaders often have to deal with parents who are highly critical of the teachers and the school’s extracurricular programmes (Addi-Raccah and Grinshtain, 2018).…”