Sustainable Ethical Leadership and Employee Outcomes in the Hotel Industry in Cameroon

Abstract

Lack of sustainability in ethical behavior is one of the principal reasons for unsustainable outcomes. The present study observes how sustainability in ethical leadership affects employee outcomes like trust, effective commitments, and organizational deviance. Ethical behavior and decisions of leaders will continue to be a source of concern in organizations where deviant actions are carried out by employees. The perception of bad ethics becomes a threat to the success of the organization. This study examines the impact of ethical leadership (EL) on trust (TR), affective commitment (AC), and deviance behavior of employees in the hotel industry. Using convenience sampling and a cross-sectional research method, the study made use of 150 questionnaires to get the perceptions of the respondents about the constructs. Data were obtained from employees of hotels in Cameroon. Confirmatory factor analysis, path analysis, and correlation analysis were conducted to assess the primary outcomes and to test the causality between each set of variables. The results showed that ethical leadership encourages employees to build trust in their leaders. Employees become effectively committed to their jobs and, thus, find no reason to engage in deviance actions. Furthermore, the results also confirm that trust feelings towards the leader by the employees positively influence affective commitment, hence, prevent deviance actions. Therefore, effectively committed employees do not engage in organizational deviance behaviors (OD). In light of these results, practical implications and recommendations are provided for decision-makers and future researchers.

Avoiding employee deviance in the hotel industry: Investigating the mediating effect of trust in leadership

“…In previous works related to relationship administration, being committed is indistinctly connected to trust. Staff who demonstrate trust in their managers show elevated levels of devotion to the institution and thus will not indulge in unrelated acts; their devotion will totally erased unrelated manners (Tarkang & Ozturen 2019).…”

“…In the past decades, the construct of ethical leadership has been given maximum attention in organizations as a result of strict government laws and heightened pressure from the media (Ko, Ma, Bartnik, Haney, & Kang, 2018). Nevertheless, studies that are related to this topic have yet to be conducted (Waldman, Wang, Hannah, & Balthazard, 2017), especially in hotels in a country like Cameroon, where little is known about ethics in leadership in the hospitality industry (Tarkang & Ozturen, 2019). Ethical leadership plays a vigorous part in improving workers' approaches to the working environment (Brown, Treviño, & Harrison, 2005).…”

Sustainable Influence of Ethical Leadership on Work Performance: Empirical Study of Multinational Enterprise in South Korea

“…Another practical implication is that the results demonstrate that ethical leadership could be a specific method for enhancing the perceived salience of ethics codes. Because the ethical leadership of immediate superiors (managers) positively relates to the employees' perceived salience of ethics codes, which are antecedent to employees' work performance, it would benefit organizations to foster managers' ethical leadership skills and behaviors [55]. One approach would be to communicate practical messages to the field of organizational members that the managers are ethical examples in their relationships with the employees, which would ultimately contribute to improved work performance [56].…”

Servant Leadership Style and High-Performance Work System Practices: Pathway to a Sustainable Jordanian Airline Industry

“…In the same view, Lee and Ha-Brookshire [10] highlighted the need to achieve organizational sustainability in the fashion retail industry in the USA by demonstrating the role of leadership in changing employee attitudes and reducing their turnover intentions. Recently, Tarkang and Ozturen [11] investigated the influence of ethical leadership as a yard stick to produce sustainable employee outcomes in the hotel industry in Cameroon. Kang [12], added to the existing literature by investigating managers' sustainable ethical leadership and its influence on employees work performance in South Korea.…”