Ethical leadership, trust in organization and their impacts on critical hotel employee outcomes

Abstract

Drawing on social exchange, social learning, and reformulation of attitude theories, our paper proposes a research model and empirically tests the interrelationships of ethical leadership, trust in organization, absenteeism, social loafing behavior, and service recovery performance. Data collected from hotel customer-contact employees two weeks apart and their direct supervisors in Nigeria were utilized to test the aforesaid linkages via structural equation modeling. The findings reveal that ethical leadership fosters employees' trust in organization and service recovery performance, while it mitigates their absenteeism. In addition, trust in organization triggers service recovery performance, while it is a panacea to absenteeism and social loafing behavior. The abovementioned findings implicitly suggest that trust in organization mediates the influence of ethical leadership on absenteeism, social loafing behavior, and service recovery performance. The findings emphasize the need for ethical leadership, which fosters trust in organization and service recovery performance and alleviates absenteeism.