Uncovering the Relationship between Ethical Leadership, Employee Retention, and Organizational Engagement: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

The success of an organization is contingent upon the leader, who occupies the central position. Scholars and practitioners emphasize the necessity of leaders' ethical and moral behavior. The present research endeavored to investigate the characteristic of ethical leadership in promoting organizational identification and mediating the role of turnover intention, drawing on entity morality theory and social identity theory. The data was collected through a questionnaire using a random sampling technique in a cross-sectional research design with a deductive approach. Regression analysis was employed to analyze data from 380 employees of Pakistan's cement industry. The results indicate that ethical leadership is positively correlated with organizational identification and negatively correlated with turnover intention. The cross-sectional design and limited sample size are the primary constraints of this study. Data from larger samples and data on actual turnover, rather than intention, may be collected in future studies. This investigation suggests that leaders of cement industries operating in the rural outskirts of Pakistan may implement ethical leadership strategies to cultivate organizational identification and decrease turnover intention. This research is a substantial contribution to the field, as it has gathered data from companies operating in the rural outskirts of Pakistan, which are situated outside of conventional industrial zones.