The effect of ethical leadership behavior on whistleblowing and the intermediate role of organizational justice: A research on public

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of ethical leadership behavior on employees' intention to whistleblowing, the mediating role of organizational justice on this effect, and whether the results differ in terms of demographic characteristics. To achieve this goal, the research was conducted on 400 MEB personnel and teachers working in Emirdağ district of Afyonkarahisar province. SPSS 22 for Windows (Social Package Statiscal Science) statistical package program was used in the analysis of the 247 survey data for which feedback was given. In order to detect differences, the Mann-Whitney U test was used for groups of two and the Kruskal-Wallis test was used for groups of more than two. Additionally, Spreaman correlation analysis was performed to test the relationship between variables. As a result of these analyses, it was seen that there were significant differences between demographic characteristics such as gender and working hours and whistleblowing. It shows that female participants follow a more sharing attitude with information within the institution with people outside the institution or with competent authorities, compared to men. Likewise, it was observed that as the participants' working hours increased, their intentions to disclose whistleblowing. Analyzes among the variables of the study showed that there is a positive, low-level significant relationship between ethical leadership and the information disclosure scale as a whole and its sub-dimensions, internal and external information disclosure. However, it has been determined that there is no significant relationship between the silence dimension, which is one of the sub-dimensions of information disclosure, and ethical leadership behavior. It was determined that there was a positive, highly significant relationship between the participants' ethical leadership behavior and their perception of organizational justice. At the same time, it was determined that there was a positive, low-level significant relationship between internal whistleblowing, one of the sub-dimensions of whistleblowing, while there was no significant relationship between external information disclosure and silence sub-dimensions. In this case, it was concluded that ethical leadership behavior has a low-level significant relationship on employees' information disclosure intentions and that organizational justice has a partial mediating role in this relationship.