The Role of Employee Moral Awareness in Promoting Ethical Leadership: Towards Reducing Organisational Deviance in Ghana

Abstract

A leader’s influence on subordinate behaviour may not always be direct as indicated by some researchers. Ethical leadership’s influence may be dependent on other boundary factors. Employees’ attentiveness to moral issues varies depending on how they cognitively process moral signals. This difference in employee moral awareness influences how an individual persistently recognizes and perceives morality and moral elements and subsequently practices its requirements. The study gap revolves around how employee moral awareness relates to ethical leadership and organisational deviance in the Ghanaian context. One key objective was to determine whether employee moral awareness moderates the nexus between organisational deviance and ethical leadership since the body of research on EL has largely relied on a leader-focused approach without regard to how subordinates’ characteristics form boundary conditions to shape EL influence. The study also investigated the relationship between ethical leadership and organisational deviance. The study targeted 12 tier-1 banks operating as universal banks in Ghana and used a quantitative approach to sample and collect data from respondents associated with these banks. In analyzing the data, structural equation modelling, as well as descriptive statistics, were used. Results from the study report a significant negative relationship between ethical leadership and organisational deviance. Subordinate moral awareness also had an important moderating function in the association between organisational deviance and ethical leadership. Moral awareness training is recommended to be incorporated into organisational human resource training programs.