The impact of ethical leadership on turnover intention through organizational commitment

Human resources serve as one of the strategic assets, the organization owns. In that competitive environment, companies struggle to find and keep talented employees, as developing a strong interest on nurturing organizational commitment and decreasing turnover intention. In that web of variables, ethical leadership emerge as a distinct topic in terms of its effect on both organizational commitment and turnover intention. In fact, it has been a while whereby experts acknowledged leaders' role in nurturing an ethical working environment (Hegarty & Sims, 1979). Ethical leadership as a significant aspect of the organization, as leaders' as having moral principles, values, beliefs and exerting these to concrete behaviors, in the long term establishing an ethical climate within the organization (Khuntia & Suar, 2004; Kanungo, 2001). The main objective of this study is to study the effect of ethical leadership and organizational commitment on employee turnover intention. For that aim, main components of ethical leadership as of role.clarification, morality.and.fairness, power.sharing are studied against three.components.of.organizational.commitment.. Accordingly, 14 hypotheses were formed under 2 main dimensions (ethical leadership.on organizational.commitment.and the latter,.on turnover intention), among which 6 were accepted. The findings suggested that ethical leaders' sense of morality and fairness seem to affect continuance commitment of employees, whereas ethical leaders' power sharing tendency. Seem to have direct impact on affective commitment. On the other hand, searching for the relationship between.organizational commitment and turnover intention, it was found that, employees who sense higher levels of commitment, either emotionally or rationally, would be less expected to quit the job. Lazar (2004) stated the negative correlation with three dimensions of organizational commitment and turnover intention of employees. However, another field of inquiry verified the close relationship between affective commitment and turnover intention, emphasizing how emotional ties overweigh employees' likelihood to stay in the organization (Dyk & Coetzee, 2012; Galletta et al., 2011).