Social learning theory serves as a theoretical foundation for contending that ethical leadership will engender ethical climate in teaching context. Social learning theory proposes that individuals are influenced by observing role models in their environment [7]. According to Bandura [7], almost anything that can be learned through direct experience can also be learned by vicarious experience, through observing other peoples’ behaviour and its attendant consequences. Such consequences make it easy to learn in an anticipatory way.
In work setting, employees can learn what type of behaviours are accepted, commended, and penalised through role modelling. Thus, they become informed about the advantages of the modelled behaviour and the disadvantages of improper behaviour. For a person to be regarded as a role model, the person must be seen by others as credible and attractive. Being seen as credible and attractive are hinged on the power and status of the individual in question [7]. When those that are looked at by others as likely role models occupy high status or powerful position, others will attempt to emulate their behaviour because it expresses expectations and approved norms [7]. A leader such as a head teacher is a significant and possible source of such role model due to their assigned role, high standing status in a school, and their positional power to influence the behaviour of other teachers to accomplish schoolwork-related outcomes.
A social learning viewpoint on ethical leadership will suggest that ethical leaders (head teachers) influence the ethical behaviour of their subordinates (i.e., other teachers who occupy lower cadre in the school) through modelling. Thus, if head teachers as leaders are to be viewed as ethical leaders who can affect their subordinates’ ethical conduct, they must first of all demonstrate exemplary credibility in their own conduct as role models because other teachers may be suspicious about ethical assertions made by such leaders. A head teacher becomes attractive and credible as an ethical role model by engaging in behaviours that are appraised by subordinates as ethical.
Therefore, ethical leaders become social learning models by rewarding proper conduct and meting out punishment for misconduct [56]. By setting the ethical tone of a school and providing a road map to guide the ethical conduct of the subordinates, such leaders are likely to be perceived by the subordinates as leaders who maintain high level of integrity in discharging their leadership responsibilities. In turn, such perception of leader integrity may cascade to the ethical climate of the school. In other words, teachers are likely to see ethical head teachers as those with integrity which, over time may contribute to the formation of ethical climate of the school. Thus, we extend the social learning perspective by incorporating perceived leader integrity as a potential mechanism that helps transmits the influence of ethical leaders in a teaching context. That is, ethical leadership will lead to perception of leader integrity which subsequently will lead to perception of being surrounded by high level of ethical climate in the school. Previous studies based on social learning theory have provided support for this theory especially in the areas of ethical leadership and ethical climate (e.g., [35, 49]) as well as perceived leader integrity [44] and their links to important organisational outcomes.
Ethical leadership and ethical climate
Grojean, Resick, Dickson, and Smith [22] assert that besides enhancing organisational efficiency, leaders equally have the responsibilities of guiding the behaviours of their subordinates and institutionalising the ethical values and conduct of members of the organisation. One style of leadership that seem to align themselves with these responsibilities is ethical leadership given that they strive to convey high ethical values to their subordinates. Accordingly, ethical leadership refers to the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making [italics in original] ([11], p. 120). Behaving in a normatively appropriate way means to behave in accordance with general expectations on how leaders ought to behave in a corporate environment. This suggests that leaders should be honest, fair, trustworthy, and caring and answerable for their conduct, as well as to reward and punish subordinates accordingly in order to hold them accountable for their actions.
By acting as role models of normatively appropriate conduct and using reward and punishment to encourage ethical conduct [11, 56], ethical head teachers signal to the subordinates (i.e., lower-cadre teachers) that nothing short of doing the right thing is expected from them and valued by the organisation. In no time, the lower-cadre teachers are more likely to perceive an ethical climate in their school. Consistent with this view, Grojean et al. [22] acknowledge that even though other factors might contribute to the determination of ethical climate, leaders exert the greatest influence on the ethical climate of an organisation.
Lending support to the above argument, Neubert et al. [41] collected Internet-based data from full-time employees and found a positive relationship between ethical leadership and ethical climate. Mayer et al. [35] examined the mediating role of ethical climate in the ethical leadership–employee misconduct relation among employees from a variety of organisations in the United States. Mayer et al.’s results show that ethical leadership was positively related to ethical climate, and that ethical climate mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and employee misconduct. Similarly, in South Korea, Shin [49] found a positive relationship between chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) self-rated ethical leadership and employees’ aggregated perceptions of the ethical climate of the organisation. In similar vein, Lu and Lin [32] also found positive relationship between ethical leadership and ethical climate based on data collected from employees of Taiwan International Ports Corporation (TIPC) in Taiwan. Demirtas and Akdogan [16] examined the indirect relationship between ethical leadership and organisational outcomes (i.e., affective commitment and turnover intention) through ethical climate. The participants involved middle-level managers, engineers, chiefs of the maintenance shops, and blue-collar full-time employees of aviation industries. The results show that ethical leadership was positively related to ethical climate. Ethical climate partially mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and affective commitment. Also, ethical climate partially mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and turnover intention. More recently, Al Halbusi, Williams, Mansoor, Hassan, and Hamid [1] found that ethical leadership was positively related to employees’ ethical behaviour in Baghdad (Republic of Iraq).
In sum, the above studies have unanimously provided strong evidence showing that ethical leadership has direct positive relationship with ethical climate across diverse climes and organisational/occupational contexts but not teaching. Moreover, most of these studies were conducted in the United States and Asia with their own cultural peculiarities. As such, research is yet to ascertain whether similar findings would be obtained in Nigerian teaching context. Besides, one key question that remains to be addressed in literature bothers on how ethical leadership influences ethical climate. That is, what mechanism is involved in the ethical leadership-ethical climate relationship? Asking such a question is very important because according to Baron and Kenny [8], when there is such consistency in the relationship between two variables, then it is likely that there is a mediator between them that tend to facilitate the relationship. Accordingly, in response to that question, we propose perceived leader integrity as a mechanism (i.e., mediator) underlying the link between ethical leadership and ethical climate. As such, the current study complements the literature in this area by opening the black box behind the ethical leadership-ethical climate relationship.
Perceived leader integrity as a mediator
Perceptions of leader integrity has been identified as a fundamental characteristic of effective leadership [40, 43]. Such perceptions are important to followers because they embody important information which helps in minimising the incertitude surrounding the decision to follow [30]. When a leader is seen by followers as having integrity, they become confident that the leader will lead in honest, felicitous, and concordant manner in line with professed vision [40]. Given the importance of leader integrity in subordinates’ impression about the leader, we opted to assess leader’s integrity as perceived by subordinates which we reckon, could help subordinates in forming holistic impression about their organisation.
Perceived leader integrity, according to Craig and Gustafson [15], refers to employees’ perception of the moral behaviour demonstrated by their leader. This suggests that perception of leader integrity elicit a judgment that the leader is seen as a moral person. Therefore, in order to be effective, leaders should be perceived by their followers as exhibiting a level of integrity in accordance with followers’ expectations [15]. According to Badaracco and Ellsworth [6], leaders with integrity will strive to be consistent in whatever they believe in, how they lead others, and the type of organisations they want to identify with. They keep to their words even when it appears to be inconvenient to do so [11]. Such leaders usually cultivate open and honest communication especially in discussions that are related to decision-making [60]. As Malan and Smit [33] stated, leaders are committed and loyal to the organisation when they lead with integrity and demonstrate what consistency in behaviour means in line with what they say. Consistency in terms of decisions and behaviour will make a leader to be seen as dependable, trustworthy and having integrity [18, 46].
In a teaching context, teachers are likely to perceive their head teacher who adopts ethical leadership style as also having integrity. This is because by being cautious of ethical standards and paying close attention to the consequences of personal and organisational decisions on ethical issues, ethical leaders signal to subordinates the importance and value attached to integrity. Honesty, fairness, trustworthy, and integrity [11, 46, 57] appear to be the watch word of an ethical leader. Thus, adopting ethical leadership is likely to make subordinates perceive such a leader as someone with high integrity. In turn, subordinates may come to view themselves as being surrounded by ethical climate in their school. Consistent with this view, Litwin and Stringer [31] observed that the understanding of realities in organisational setting is hinged on the perception of the organisational members. In that sense, perceiving a head teacher as having integrity may be an important mechanism through which ethical leaders promote the ethical climate of their school.
Existing studies can be used to draw inference for our arguments regarding the role of perceived leader integrity. For instance, one study indicated that integrity moderated the relationship between certain aspects of transformational leadership and some aspects of ethical climate among employees of medium and large organisations in South Africa (e.g., [60]). In another study, it was reported that organisational justice mediated the positive relationship between ethical leadership and employees’ ethical behaviour [1]. In addition, Neubert et al. [41] found that interactional justice moderated (boosted) the relationship between ethical leadership and ethical climate among full-time employees based on Internet data. In addition, Schminke et al. [48] found that leader Utilizer score (U-score or moral development utilization), which refers to the consistency between the leader’s moral development and actions, moderated the relationship between leader moral development and organisational ethical climate such that the relationship between leader moral development and ethical climate was stronger for high U-score leaders than for low U-score leaders.
Given the promising empirical support for perceived leader integrity, one would expect that ethical leadership will be related to perceived leader integrity which in turn is likely to mediate the ethical leadership–ethical climate relationship among teachers. See Fig. 1 for the hypothesized model of the current study.