Ethical Leadership and Employees’ Creativity: The Mediating Role of Organizational Pride
| 28 lut 2024
Data publikacji: 28 lut 2024
Zakres stron: 25 - 40
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/fman-2024-0002
Słowa kluczowe
© 2024 Yazan Emnawer Al-Haraisa, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
In recent times with rapid changes in the global landscape, firms are required to constantly enhance the creative behavior of the employees to handle competitive capacity and take care of practices of ethical leadership (Esguerra et al., 2022). Creativity is essential to employees and organizations (Ahmed and Sigamony, 2020). Moreover, creativity is an essential part of the organization's existence, and the competency to improve the organizational effectiveness through increasing the performance of a team (Elqassaby, 2018). Consequently, it is expected that leaders encourage employees’ creative skills by directing them to alteration and conversion (Karabey and Aliogullari, 2018). In contrast, the theme of ethical leadership has received much attention from researchers and leaders in recent years due to the moral scandals that have emerged in organizations (Zhu, et al., 2004). Furthermore, the leader is a role model for subordinates and he or she has the abilities and features to influence the employees' behaviors in the firm. Meanwhile, ethical leadership is an imperative requirement for enhancing the firm's sustainability (Adawiyah, et al., 2022).
Ethical leadership is a significant contributing factor to job performance and organizational outcomes (Qabool, et al., 2021). Most likely, the leaders who have ethical leadership are encouraging their followers to possess ethical behavior via the two-way connection (Rantika and Yustina, 2017). According to Ahmed (2020), the ethical behavior of leaders is considered as one of the most important forms of leadership predictable for its effectiveness because it has a positive impact on the employees’ behavior patterns, as well as it perhaps involves numerous standards like traits of moral administrative, traits of moral personality, traits of human relations, and traits of team spirit work which significantly impact on the productivity and career attainment.
Organizational pride attains benefits and advantages to organizations by improving commitment and decreasing the costs of turnover encouraging them to increase production and thus improve performance, notwithstanding that their impact on organizations has been considered, it is not clear what is the way can be used by an organization to create organizational pride. Therefore, organizations need to fully understand how to build pride in their organization because it may achieve emotional commitment unless it cannot be attained by monetary compensation. Furthermore, they need to identify what are the things that make the workers proud of their organization and their role in the organization and thus make them able to determine a strategy to improve this feeling (Pereira, 2021). Particularly, pride in an organization displays that workers are capable and have positive perspectives toward other people, and organizational pride demonstrates the employees’ perceptions precisely and their capabilities in an organization (Nouri, et al., 2017).
Many researchers have conducted studies that measured the impact of different leadership styles on employee creativity. At the same time, there are few studies that have addressed the impact of ethical leadership on employee creativity, generally, in the Arab environment and, in particular, in the Jordanian environment (Masianoga and Chakauya, 2023; Bozdoğan and ve Aksoy, 2023; Elqassaby, 2018). Additionally, reviewing the literature studies showed that no prior studies have addressed the impact of ethical leadership on employees’ creativity with the mediating role of organizational pride.
Accordingly, the current study might be one of the first studies that examines the relationship among the study variables. Therefore, the contribution of the current study is to fill the gap of knowledge in aspects of ethical leadership, employees' creativity, and organizational pride by providing empirical evidence relating to organizational pride which is probable to have a mediator role in the relationship between ethical leadership and employees' creativity. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to examine the impact of ethical leadership on employees' creativity via organizational pride by answering the following questions: Q1: What is the impact of ethical leadership on employees' creativity? Q2: Does ethical leadership impact organizational pride? Q3: Is there an impact of organizational pride on employees' creativity? Q4: Is there a mediation impact of organizational pride on the relationship between ethical leadership and employees' creativity?
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 is a literature review, containing ethical leadership, organizational pride, and employees' creativity. Section 3 is a study model. Section 4 discusses research methodology. Section 5 is a data analysis. Section 6 is results and discussion. Section 7 is conclusion. Section 8 highlights limitations and future prospects.
Ethical leadership is considered as one of the most important dimensions of the whole leadership construct that is essentially relevant to the vision, energizing, and inspiration of the behavior (Zahra and Waheed, 2017). Drucker (1974) provided a definition of ethical leadership and described it as the process of directing people toward a high prospective vision and thus increasing their performance to higher criteria and building a superior personality that exceeds its natural limitations. Historically, ethical leadership has been introduced by Brown et al. (2005), which is defined as a behavior aligned with common standards and values through the personal connections that bind leaders to their followers. It can be defined as the recovery and stimulation of the love power and realizing that leadership is based on the mutual benefits with the followers (Mihelič, et al., 2010). Rost (1991) stated that ethical leadership represents the relationship between leaders and their followers and that both leaders and followers agree that deliberate workplace alterations are characterized by justice and mutual satisfaction and promote independence and values without bargaining for integrity.
Furthermore, ethical leadership can occur when the leader esteems and respects the ethical and right values and with a consideration of the status and beliefs of other people (Elqassaby, 2018). Ethical leaders differentiate themselves by displaying features that are aligned with normative ethical principles that consist of many traits, namely, sincerity, justice, trustworthiness, and making fair and rational decisions (Okana and Akyuzb, 2015). Hegarty and Moccia (2018) pointed out that an organization should behave ethically for many reasons: the pressure from shareholders toward growth, the top managements strive to attain its specified goals, huge financial losses, and even lack of awareness. More specifically, ethical leadership is the most suitable pattern of leadership to inspire workers to be involved emotionally with their labor (Bhatti, et al., 2020). Scholars reported that ethical leaders communicate openly with their followers to avoid unsuitable organizational procedures and behaviors to confirm to do the right things and thus publish high ethical standards to their followers and support them to express their opinions and propositions not only on ethical issues but also in the area of other processes related to the work (Karabey and Aliogullari, 2018). In addition, the leader–member exchange theory suggests that the relationship quality is based on the trusted quality between leaders and their followers and is expected from this relationship to bring a lot of benefits and effective outcomes and offer considerable attitudes toward their work (Saleem, et al., 2020).
The organizational pride is playing a basic role in enhancing organizational performance (Seyedpour, et al., 2020). Organizational pride is viewed as a set of feelings and positive attitudes hold by individuals toward their organization that push them to be proud in front of other people because they are considered as a part of the organization and proud of their accomplishments (Morsi, 2015).
In addition, organizational pride will constitute the easy process of employees' tasks execution within the organization which can achieve effectively the work in the organization and shall support the job satisfaction of employees (Nilawati, et al., 2019).
Id Bouichou, et al. (2022) mentioned that organizational pride can be described as the degree to which an employee feels pleasure and raises his or her selfesteem because of organizational affiliation. Katzenbach (2003) observed that organizational pride principally feeds the affective commitment of employees toward the organization and stimulates them to provide the maximum in what they have and more than expected in the fields of working through hard work, initiative, and overcoming all obstacles and difficulties. Furthermore, there are two types of organizational pride; the first type is that service employees can practice in the short term, persistent emotional feelings of pride relied on the observation of a positive event connected to the firm; and the second type is that employees can enjoy the cognitive continuous situation and strong of pride as a result of a successful event associated to the firm (Gouthier and Rhein, 2011). Based on the above, the author defined organizational pride as a group of positive feelings and emotions of employees toward the organization as a result of privileges, facilities, and motivation provided by the organization in order to push and encourage their employees to be proud of their jobs.
Creativity is considered as the main source of competitive advantage for the organization's growth and development, and it is one of the most important intangible assets of management functions for keeping a competitive advantage (Jo and Lee, 2012). Employee creativity denotes the delivering, generating, and executing of useful and new ideas regarding goods whether products or services and practices, and thus, creativity is an important portion of organization growth and sustainability (Elqassaby, 2018). Creativity is established in the minds of individual employees whether lonely or cooperating with others that implement the company work day-by-day despite it being derived from the whole company and access to resources (Lee and Tan, 2012). Likewise, employee creativity is necessary for an environment characterized by dynamics and instability, particularly for organizations that want to make a profit (Utamaa and Purbab, 2018). Furthermore, employee creativity can be defined as generating beneficial and innovative ideas, practices, and products as raw materials for extra innovations (Asad, et al., 2021). Amabile and Gryskiewicz (1989) assert that employees' creativity is viewed as the ability to create modern ideas that result in the end to produce new products or services, production approaches, or new processes in the work. Wang, et al. (2010) pointed out that employee creativity is necessary and contributes to the organization in terms of growth and development, so scholars are becoming increasingly interested in discovering the conditions that affect employee creativity, which is represented in supporting and encouraging the work for creativity. Despite this, it is too difficult to motivate creativity because employees feel worried about creativity performance in the environment of work (Janssen, 2003). In contrast, to motivate and encourage employee creativity, organization engage their employees in some activities such as providing ideas and recommendations and information inside the organization, and this can give the employees to share in creative and innovative thinking inside the organization, and this gives the employee positive image toward them (Syafitri, et al., 2021).
Scholars remark that the social learning standpoint of ethical leadership suggests that the leader impacts others by modeling such as learning based on observational, imitation, and documentation, and they added that the ethical leadership construct is the most productive because it allows developing the ethical model from the point of start to the point of peak, which means taking the care regarding the specific business situation and organizational culture of ethics and also working through the certain standards for management (Vēvere and Liniņa, 2016). On the other hand, many studies done by many practitioners and researchers in the area of ethical leadership and employees’ creativity (e.g., Li, et al., 2023) remark that ethical leadership correlated positively with employees’ creativity with the presence of help-seeking behavior as a mediating variable. Asif, et al. (2022) observed a positive and significant relationship between ethical leadership and employee creativity. Ethical leadership and job autonomy have a positive influence on employees’ creative deviance and that job autonomy has a mediating role in the relationship between ethical leadership and creative deviance (Liu, et al., 2021). Ethical leadership and shared leadership have impacted positively team creativity (Wang, et al., 2021). Furthermore, there is a significant association between ethical leadership and employee creativity (Elqassaby, 2018). Ethical leadership encourages creativity in the workplace (Javed, 2018). Moreover, ethical leadership has a positive and significant relationship with employee creativity and trust (Mehmood, 2016). As per the componential theory of creativity, Amabile suggested that leadership is considered as one of the most important fields in perceived work environments that help to know the employee's creativity in terms of both the level and the frequency (Elqassaby, 2018). Based on the above, the first hypothesis: H1: Ethical leadership has a significant and positive impact on employees' creativity.
Tamer (2021) revealed that there are positive associations between ethical leadership approaches and organizational commitment and employees’ performance. Socially responsible human resource management and organizational pride independently and successively mediate the leadership–innovative behavior relationship (Dong and Zhong, 2021). Daus and Baumgartner (2020) observed that the leader-articulated authentic pride was highly correlated with the individual satisfaction of the leader, individual satisfaction with the task, and individual ranking of cohesion of the group and its satisfaction. Ethical leadership might contribute to raising employee productivity and loyalty and satisfaction as well as trust and work engagement and remove unethical behavior. Furthermore, ethical leadership might create sustainability for the companies, and practicing ethical leadership is significant and is recommended to all companies in their business practices (Samidi and Sjahrifa, 2018). Wu (2017) pointed out that ethical climate mediates the link between ethical leadership and ethical sales behavior. In doing so, leaders notice that ethical leadership pays off with pride loyalty and commitment (Kooskora, 2012). Accordingly, the second hypothesis: H2: Ethical leadership has a significant and positive impact on organizational pride.
Ahmed and Sigamony (2020) argued that ideas of creative businesses differentiate the business from one another and it is an essential requirement for all organizations without exception, and thus, they should focus more on creativity by motivating their employees by focusing on the rewards systems to enhance their contribution through thinking process in unique ways.
Many studies were done to test the impact of organizational pride on employees' creativity. Durrah, et al. (2021) found that the dimension of attitudinal organizational pride has a direct and positive impact on creativity and there is no effect of emotional pride on creativity. Widyanti, et al. (2020) state that there is a significant and positive impact of organizational justice and organizational pride on job satisfaction and job performance. In this regard, organizational pride and job satisfaction have a significant and positive impact on organizational citizenship behavior (Nilawati, et al., 2019). Moreover, there is a positive and direct impact of emotional organizational pride on a commitment to customer service and creativity (Gouthier and Rhein, 2011). Thus, the third hypothesis: H3: Organizational pride has a significant and positive impact on employees' creativity.
Asad, et al. (2021) revealed that there is a significant relationship between transformational leadership and employee creative performance. Furthermore, a positive effect of authentic leadership on creativity and innovation and psychological capital mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and creativity and innovation (Rashid, et al., 2019). Another view ascertains that there is an impact of organizational pride on lecturer performance (Nadatien, et al., 2019). Karabey and Aliogullari (2018) indicated that ethical leadership has a positive impact on leader–member exchange. Also, leader–member exchange has a positive influence on creativity. Arshad and Imran (2016) showed how organizational morality fosters employee creativity especially when emotions of organizational pride enter as a mediating variable. From the above discussions, the author found that there is an impact of ethical leadership on employee creativity but did not find any study that linked directly between ethical leadership, organizational pride, and employee creativity. Therefore, the fourth hypothesis: H4: Ethical leadership has a significant and positive impact on employees' creativity through organizational pride.
Figure 1 shows the study model developed by the author based on previous studies, which explains the impact of ethical leadership on employees’ creativity through the mediating role of organizational pride.
Figure 1.
Study model.
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The current study adopted a quantitative approach to examine the mediating role of organizational pride on the relationship between ethical leadership and employees’ creativity. Furthermore, structural equation modeling (SEM) was adopted to test the study hypotheses.
The study population involves the private hospitals in Jordan located in Amman governance. The samples also include (130) employees drawn from the study population. Besides, the managers, heads of the department, and their employees constitute the unit of analysis. The convenient sample is used in this study to select the study sample because of the difficulty of enumerating the study population. Furthermore, 130 questionnaires were distributed, and 100 questionnaires were retrieved. Moreover, the response rate of the retrieved questionnaires was 78%.
The author developed a questionnaire based on previous studies that comprised demographic information. In addition, ethical leadership has been obtained from the study by Brown, et al. (2005), namely, the leadership scale which consists of ten items. Furthermore, organizational pride has been obtained from the scale of Gunter and Furnham (1996) which involves seven items. The employee's creativity was adopted from the study by Zhou and George (2001) which includes eleven items. Additionally, a 5-point Likert scale was adopted from this study.
Table 1 displays the arithmetic means and standard deviation values for the study variables from the perspective of participants. In other words, it means that private hospitals use ethical leadership, organizational pride, and employees' creativity moderately from the participants' perspective.
The arithmetic means and standard deviation
| Variable | Mean | Standard Deviations | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ethical leadership | 2.64 | 1.012 | Moderate |
| Organizational pride | 2.56 | 1.013 | Moderate |
| Employees’ creativity | 2.60 | 1.006 | Moderate |
(
The author tests the hypotheses of the current study by using structural equation modeling – partial least squares. Furthermore, data have been analyzed by using the Measurement Model Assessment. In this regard, the Measurement Model Assessment consists of measuring the internal consistency reliability and composite reliability, assessing convergent validity and average variance extracted values, and confirming the discriminant validity test by the Heterotrait-Monotrait ratio of correlations values (HTMT). Consequently, Table 2 explains the measurement assessment result which shows that the values of all factor loading are greater than 0.70 except Q7, which will be removed in the second level as shown in Figure 3. Furthermore, Table 2 explains that the values of average variance extracted were greater than 0.50, which verifies convergent validity (Hair et al., 2014). Additionally, Table 2 illustrates that the values of Cronbach’s alpha are more than 0.70. As well, the values of composite reliability are more than 0.70, which ensures internal consistency reliability. Lastly, Table 2 explains that the values of HTMT do not involve (1), which means that the measurements of discriminant validity are met and have been established (Hair, et al., 2014).
Measurement Model Assessment
| - | - | Convergent Validity | Internal Consistency Reliability | Discriminant Validity | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Latent Variable | Indicators | Loadings > 0.70 | AVE > 0.50 | Cronbach’s Alpha > 0.70 | Composite Reliability > 0.70 | HTMT Confidence interval does not involve (1) |
| Ethical leadership | Q1 | 0.750 | 0.602 | 0.934 | 0.943 | Yes |
| Q2 | 0.940 | |||||
| Q3 | 0.708 | |||||
| Q4 | 0.908 | |||||
| Q5 | 0.775 | |||||
| Q6 | 0.895 | |||||
| Q7 | 0.627 | |||||
| Q8 | 0.923 | |||||
| Q9 | 0.904 | |||||
| Q10 | 0.709 | |||||
| Organizational pride | Q11 | 0.737 | 0.674 | 0.944 | 0.953 | Yes |
| Q12 | 0.702 | |||||
| Q13 | 0.787 | |||||
| Q14 | 0.793 | |||||
| Q15 | 0.835 | |||||
| Q16 | 0.847 | |||||
| Q17 | 0.809 | |||||
| Employees’ creativity | Q18 | 0.835 | 0.622 | 0.898 | 0.920 | Yes |
| Q19 | 0.856 | |||||
| Q20 | 0.753 | |||||
| Q21 | 0.745 | |||||
| Q22 | 0.753 | |||||
| Q23 | 0.802 | |||||
| Q24 | 0.700 | |||||
| Q25 | 0.740 | |||||
| Q26 | 0.758 | |||||
| Q27 | 0.816 | - | ||||
| Q28 | 0.760 | |||||
(
Figure 2.
Measurement model.
(
Figure 3.
Structural model (second-level analysis).
(
Table 3 displays the analysis results which explain that ethical leadership has a significant and positive impact on employees’ creativity. In this regard, R2 = (0.837), which is explained that ethical leadership interprets 83% of the change in the employees’ creativity, whereas the values of t = (57.025), β = (0.915), and P= (0.000). Consequently, the first hypothesis is accepted. Similarly, Table 3 explains that ethical leadership has a significant and positive impact on organizational pride. In this respect, R2 = (0.900), which is explained that ethical leadership interprets 90% of the change in the organizational pride, whereas the values of t = (83.781), β = (0.949), and P = (0.000).
Results of hypothesis testing
| - | Variables | R2 | R2 Adjusted | B | SD | Sig | Decision | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| H1 | E L → E C | 0.837 | 0.835 | 0.915 | 0.016 | 57.025 | 0.000 | Supported |
| H2 | E L→ O P | 0.900 | 0.899 | 0.949 | 0.011 | 83.781 | 0.000 | Supported |
| H3 | O P → E C | 0.861 | 0.859 | 0.928 | 0.016 | 58.027 | 0.000 | Supported |
| H4 | E L → O P→EC | 0.895 | 0.893 | 0.592 | 0.126 | 4.701 | 0.000 | Supported |
(
As a result, the second hypothesis is accepted. Furthermore, Table 3 explains that organizational pride has a significant and positive impact on employees' creativity. In this line, R2 = (0.861), which is explained that organizational pride interprets 86% of the variation in the employees' creativity, whereas the values of t = (58.027), β = (0.928), and P = (0.000). Hereafter, the third hypothesis is accepted. On the other side, the author has tracked the techniques defined by Preacher and Hayes (2008) to test the fourth hypothesis. In this regard, Table 4 explains the mediation analysis results which showed that the values of confidence interval of upper and lower levels do not contain zero. More specifically, the direct and indirect effects are positive. Therefore, there is a significant and positive partial mediation of organizational pride on the relationship between ethical leadership and employees' creativity.
Mediation test
| - | Bootstrapped Confidence Interval | - | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| - | Path a | Path b | Indirect effect | S.E | t-value | 95% LL | 95%UL | Decision |
| H4 | 0.946 | 0.626 | 0.318 | 0.126 | 2.524 | 0.071 | 0.565 | Mediation |
(
The study found that ethical leadership has a significant and positive impact on employees' creativity. Accordingly, it is consistent with the result of the study by Li, et al. (2023) that revealed ethical leadership correlated positively with employees’ creativity with the presence of help-seeking behavior as a mediating variable. Likewise, this result is supported by Asif, et al.’s (2022) study that indicated that there is a positive and significant relationship between ethical leadership and employee creativity. Furthermore, it is consistent with the result of Liu, et al.’s (2021) study that reported that ethical leadership and job autonomy have a positive influence on an employee creative deviance and that job autonomy has a mediating role in the relationship between ethical leadership and creative deviance. In addition, this aligned with the result of Wang, et al.’s (2021) study which showed that ethical leadership and shared leadership have impacted positively team creativity. Besides, it is aligned with Elqassaby's study (2018) which pointed out that there is a significant association between ethical leadership and employee creativity. On the other side, it is also consistent with Javed’s (2018) study which reported that ethical leadership encourages creativity in the workplace. Lastly, it is supported by Mehmood’s (2016) study which discovered that ethical leadership has a positive and significant relationship with employee creativity and trust.
Accordingly, ethical leadership might create sustainability for companies, and practicing ethical leadership is significant and is recommended to all companies in their business practices (Sjahrifa, 2018).
On the other side, the results of the study showed that ethical leadership has a significant and positive impact on organizational pride. This result is consistent with the result of Tamer’s (2021) study that shows that there are positive associations between ethical leadership approaches and organizational commitment and employees’ performance. Furthermore, it is aligned with the result of the study by Dong and Zhong (2021) which showed that both socially responsible human resource management and organizational pride independently and successively mediate the leadership-innovative behavior relationship. Moreover, it is consistent with the result of the study by Daus and Baumgartner (2020) that the leader articulated authentic pride was highly correlated with the individual satisfaction of the leader, individual satisfaction with the task, and individual ranking of cohesion of the group and its satisfaction. Consequently, this aligned with the result of the study by Samidi and Sjahrifa (2018) which mentioned that ethical leadership might contribute to raising employee productivity and loyalty and satisfaction as well as trust and work engagement and remove unethical behavior. Finally, this is consistent with the result of the study by Wu (2017) that mentioned that the ethical climate mediates the link between ethical leadership and ethical sales behavior. Lastly, Kooskora (2012) identified that leaders notice that ethical leadership pays off with pride loyalty and commitment.
The current study also showed that organizational pride has a significant and positive impact on employees' creativity. This result harmonizes with the results of Durrah, et al. (2021) who found that the dimension of attitudinal organizational pride has impacted a direct and positive impact on creativity and there is no effect of emotional pride on creativity. Moreover, scholars such as Widyanti, et al. (2020) found that there is a significant and positive impact of organizational justice and organizational pride on job satisfaction and job performance. In this regard, Nilawati, et al. (2019) found that organizational pride and job satisfaction have a significant and positive impact on organizational citizenship behavior. In addition, the result is consistent with the study of Gouthier and Rhein (2011) which showed that there is a positive and direct impact of emotional organizational pride on a commitment to customer service and creativity.
Finally, the present study found that ethical leadership has a significant and positive impact on employees' creativity through the mediating role of organizational pride. In contrast, the prior studies approved that ethical leadership has a significant and positive impact on employees' creativity, ethical leadership has a significant and positive impact on organizational pride, and organizational pride has a significant and positive impact on employees' creativity. In other words, this finding is aligned with the study of Asad, et al. (2021) which found that there is a significant relationship between transformational leadership and employee creative performance. Otherwise, it is consistent with the study of Rashid, et al. (2019) which reported that there is a positive effect of authentic leadership on creativity and innovation and that psychological capital mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and creativity and innovation. Furthermore, it is supported by the result of the study conducted by Nadatien, et al. (2019) which confirms that there is an impact of organizational pride on lecturer performance. On the other hand, it is supported by the result of the study conducted by Karabey and Aliogullari (2018) which found that ethical leadership has a positive impact on leader–member exchange. Also, leader–member exchange has a positive influence on creativity. Furthermore, Arshad and Imran (2016) explained how organizational morality fosters employee creativity especially when emotions of organizational pride enter as a mediating variable.
Ethical leadership plays an essential role in encouraging and enhancing the employees in an organization to be proud of their achievements and creative in their work. In contrast, most organizations may ignore the ethical aspect despite its importance and the great role that plays in motivating and encouraging employees to be creative.
One of the most important reasons may be the lack of knowledge of the organization, in general, and the leader, in particular, about ethical standards and how to apply them optimally. Despite this, it is required that these organizations focus heavily on the ethical aspect or what is known as the code of ethical conduct with a focus on organizational pride because the workers within the organization if they are proud of their work, they will be more creative in the workplace. Despite all this, there are still shortcomings in some aspects despite the contributions of researchers in the theoretical aspect, although this study provided a solid theoretical aspect and this calls for conducting future applied studies to fill the knowledge gap.
This study was conducted in the private hospitals in Jordan, and therefore, one of the most important limitations is the inability to generalize the results of this study to Jordanian government hospitals. In addition, the sampling method used is the convenience sample method, which limits the possibility of generalizing the results. Furthermore, there are a lack of sufficient studies that link the variables of the study, especially in the presence of the mediating variable. Based on the foregoing, the study recommends the necessity of conducting more future studies on the same sector or another sector with the possibility of using another mediating variable or a moderating variable, for example, the leader’s personality, the leader’s experience, and employees’ commitment as this field still needs for more applied studies.