Ethical Leadership, Employee Trust Of Management And Organizational Citizenship Behaviour In State Corporations In Kenya

Abstract

The competitive landscape of the 21stcenturyrequires organizations’ leaders to be ethical. Ethical leadership is critical to leaders’ credibility and their potential to exert meaningful influence. This credibility in ethical leaders is likely to have a significant influence on trust between leaders and follower. The determination of how organization citizenship behavior contributes indirectly to an organization through the organization’s social system has lately, generated increasing interest to both scholars and managers. The objective of the study was to determine the effect of employee trust on the relationship between ethical leadership and organization citizenship behavior and organizational citizenship behaviour in State Corporations in Kenya. The study used cross sectional descriptive survey design. The population of the study was all the two hundred and twenty five State Corporations in Kenya. The study used stratified sampling to determine the sample size of 114. Data was collected using a structured questionnaire. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and presented using tables. The study established that the leaders at the management level of State Corporations in Kenya have developed codes of conduct and ethics which prescribes appropriate behavior for employees and leadership treats staff well by recognition, fairness, providing good working conditions, career growth, and involvement in decision making. Employees have trust the management as expressed by the respondents’ feedback that the management does its best to ensure that the organizations were successful and serving organizations’ interests. The respondents further expressed their trust by stating that their leaders have adequate capability of undertaking their role effectively as well as being trusted to make fair decisions on matters affecting employees, clients, suppliers and other stake holders of the organization. Organizational citizenship behaviors were found to have motivated employees to orient new workers on the job, teach co-workers new skills and to share job knowledge. The employees were involved on ways to improve their work and this has seen them give up meals and other breaks and even work beyond official working hours to complete their work. The study recommends that corporations should ensure that all employees participate in ethics training programmes. This serves as an opportunity for employees to learn and evaluate the impact of ethics on activities and organizational performance. It is also recommended that managers should: strive to become role models to their subordinates inspire subordinates by providing meaning and challenge to work; stimulate subordinate efforts to become innovative and creative; and pay attention to each individual’s need for achievement and growth.