Revisiting ethical leadership in social exchange: Mapping thematic trends and future directions

Abstract

Ethical leadership is a major factor in determining both moral and immoral behavior in organizations. It leads to a number of consequences, such as loyalty to the organization, job satisfaction, performance, pro-social helping actions, and employee deviance. The combined effect of moral leadership and social interaction is absent, though. This study, therefore, focuses on using VOS Viewer and Biblioshiny software to bibliometrically investigate the thematic trends and future directions on the subject matter. A total of 184 articles from the Web of Science database were analyzed. According to the study's findings, social interchange and moral leadership were associated with theme trends and important concepts. Additionally, it demonstrated four major clusters: leadership, social exchange theory, ethical leadership, and leader-member exchange. The study also demonstrates the value of combining social exchange and ethical leadership ideas to create a new concept, social exchange ethical leadership (SXEL). It further revealed a comprehensive framework that identifies the causes and effects of SXEL. The findings indicate that ethical leadership influences staff attitudes and behaviors and encourages customer-focused actions. Nevertheless, combining social interaction with moral leadership may produce diverse outcomes. The study establishes an integrated framework by emphasizing areas and gaps not previously investigated. This framework illustrates the antecedents and outcomes of SXEL and highlights the need for additional empirical testing of extraneous variables.