Ethical Leadership and Organizational Resilience in the Public Sector: Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract

Organizations operating in the public sector are operating in greater amounts of uncertainty, instability, and constant disruption. The need to remain efficient and responsive in case of emergency has been superimposed by political insecurity, economic pressures, governance demands, and growing expectations on the part of the public which have resulted in instability in institutions, especially in developing countries where shortages of resources, complex bureaucracies, and high expectations have led to institutional instability. It has been suggested that organizational resilience, or, the capacity to foresee, absorb, adapt, and recover negative events, has become a key organizational capability to continue to maintain public services, maintain and guarantee sustained operational efficiency and preserve citizen trust. As much as leadership has been known to be a key determinant of building resilience, limited empirical attention has been given to how ethical leadership can build resilience, especially in the areas of the public segments of developing countries. This contribution is done using the Social Learning Theory and focuses on how ethical leadership can contribute to making organizations in the Pakistani public sector more resilient; it does so by influencing how employees behave, make decisions, and cope with uncertainty. It is believed that ethical leadership helps individuals become stronger both directly and indirectly via belief in leadership, ethical climate and psychological safety. These are some examples of relational and psychological processes. It is necessary to have a time-lagged quantitative research design, which was achieved through collecting data on middle and senior-level workers in the public sector and analyzing it with structural equation modeling to ensure that the hypotheses were examined accordingly. The results highlight the importance of ethical leadership as a competitive organizational resource that improves relational cohesion, ethical norms, and open communication, which is necessary to build strong institutions of the state. This research contributes to the literature on leadership and public administration by taking the theory of ethical leadership further into the world of resilience and also contributes to the practical knowledge of strengthening the governance, accountability and leadership growth in the Pakistani public administration.