Engagement without a Crutch: Why Ethical Leadership Stands Alone

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to study how employee engagement is impacted by ethical leadership, mediated and moderated by moral courage and job embeddedness, respectively. The quantitative survey study design was adopted using a structured questionnaire administered to 225 bankers from leading banking organizations. Data were analysed using SEM through PLS-SEM. The findings reveal that ethical leadership significantly enhances employee engagement and operates as a self-sufficient predictor, independent of commonly assumed mediating and moderating mechanisms. Banking companies can enhance employee job engagement to retain them with high ethical leadership supervisors. This study underscores the self-sufficiency of ethical leadership in driving engagement, especially within high-pressure service industries like banking. This study challenges prevailing leadership models by demonstrating that ethical leadership alone is sufficient to drive employee engagement, offering a more parsimonious and direct explanation of employee behavior in organizational contexts.