Ethical ideology and its impact on organizational citizenship behavior: The moderating role of servant leadership

Abstract

This study examines the relationships between the ethical leadership ideology (as stipulated by idealism and egoism), organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), especially on the helpful conduct, and the moderating role of servant leadership. The design adopted in this study to address existing theoretical and methodological gaps is a dyadic design, where 392 leader-subordinate pairs in the Iraqi industrial sector were used to collect data. The results showed a positive relationship between leadership idealism and OCB, with a negative relationship between leadership egoism and OCB using the Covariance-Based Structural Equation Modeling (CB-SEM) in AMOS. The main contribution of the study is the confirmation of the moderating role of servant leadership that was found to enhance the positive role of leadership idealism on OCB and reduce the negative impact of leadership egoism on OCB. The findings contribute greatly to the body of theoretical literature on leadership, OCB, and social exchange theory by highlighting the importance of ethical foundations in leadership and servant practices to a company, manager, worker, and policymaker.