Dina Metwally

Dina Metwally内容摘要：

The Impact of Ethical Leadership on Readiness to Change: The Mediating Role of Organizational Culture Dina Metwally Faculty of Commerce & Business Administration, Helwan University, Egypt. E-mail: dinametwally2001@gmail.com Mohamed Metwally Unoversity of Deusto, Spain Email: mmetwally@opendeusto.es Corrosponding Author 10, Calle Artatzamina, 7 Dcha Bilbao 48007 Spain Unoversity of Deusto, Spain Abstract 1 Today`s organizations are working in a highly competitive and changing environment. This makes it essential for organizations to continuously change in order to survive in the market. Change may exceed change in customers` needs and expectations to development of new business strategies, which requires certain changes in organizational structure, systems, processes, or technology. Without people, organizations can not implement change successfully. The way employees respond to change is the key to organizational success. Successful change requires the support of leaders and effective participation of employees. Leaders are responsible for creating an organizational culture that fosters change and implement it smoothly and effectively. This study aims to investigate the influence of ethical leadership (EL) on employees` readiness to change through exploring the mediating effect of organizational culture. The study is conducted in public foreign trade companies in Egypt. Ethical leadership, organizational culture, and readiness to change are assessed using a five point Likert scale questionnaire. Nevertheless, the impact of demographic factors on research variables is also explored. Data were statistically analyzed using SPSS VR 22. Descriptive statistics were used for the purpose of comparison. Structured Equational Modelling was conducted using AMOS VR (22) to test the mediating effect of organizational culture on the relationship between EL and employees` readiness to change. The study provides evidence that ethical leaders have the ability to create an organizational culture that is strongly supportive to change. This culture is reflected in increasing employees` readiness to accept change as well as to support change implementation. Keywords: Ethical leadership (EL), organizational culture, readiness to change, Egyptian organizations. 1. INTRODUCTION 2 Today`s organizations are working in a highly dynamic and competitive environment which makes continuous change a necessity. Despite this, most change projects fail to meet expected results. It is argued that 70% of business process reengineering projects fail (Bashein et al, 1994). Further, Beer & Nohria (2000) show that seven out of ten change projects fails to achieve their intended outcomes. Sirkin et al (2005) argue that two out of three transformation initiatives fail. Researchers have agreed that the failure of most change programs is related to the human factor (e.g. Pool, 2000; Abdul Rashid et al, 2004; Holbeche, 2006; Eby et al, 2016). According to Holbeche (2006), change initiatives fail mainly because of people. People are usually resistant to change because they are unable to adjust the behaviour, skills, and commitment to new requirements. Employees` readiness to change has been regarded as an important factor for understanding employees` resistance to change. Readiness to change can facilitate or undermine the effectiveness of change implementation. Armenakis et al (1993) explain that the concept of readiness to change is similar to the concept of unfreezing introduced by Lewin (1951). Unfreezing refers to the process by which the beliefs and attitudes of organizational members about a pending change are altered in a way that organizational members perceive change as a necessity and likely to be successful. Eby et al (2016) argue that readiness to change evolves over time because of employees` experience with the organization. Thus, readiness to change may be considered as an important predictor of organizational ability to implement change. Research about organizational culture suggests that organizational characteristics must be consistent with the change the organization aims to create (Eby et al, 2016). It is argued that readiness to change is influenced by employees` perception and interpretation of organizational context. Thus, organizational climate and culture are expected to have a strong influence on readiness to change (Eby et al, 2016).Research on change management suggests that all approaches to change and leadership ar