Does Personality Matter in Leadership: Impact of Big Five Personality Traits on Ethical Leadership Behaviour of Middle Managers in Sri Lanka

Abstract

There are many studies on the consequences of ethical leadership, however, it is hard to find the traits of leaders and their influence on ethical leadership. Therefore, this research the aims to explore the role of a leader’s personality in ethical leadership behaviour. Consequently, this research explores the effects of each Big Five Personality traits on Ethical Leadership behaviour. Therefore, it was hypothesized that Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, and Extraversion influence on ethical leadership behaviour positively whereas Neuroticism effects on ethical leadership behaviour negatively. 400 sample was selected. 200 respondents were selected from students of Bachelor of Labour Education (BLE) program at the Institute of Human Resource Advancement (IHRA) University of Colombo. All of them are employees. Parallelly, their leaders or supervisors were included in the sample. It was used a cross-sectional design for data collection. Leader of each respondent was asked to complete the Big Five Inventory (BFI) to measure the personality of leaders and employees were asked to complete the Ethical Leadership questionnaire to measure their insights against ethical behaviour of their leaders/superiors. Only one employee was selected if more than one employee work under the same leader/supervisor. Findings indicated that the Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience and Extraversion significantly and positively effect on ethical leadership whereas the Neuroticism effects significantly and negatively on ethical leadership. These results suggest the importance of four personality traits respectively, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, and Extraversion to become an ethical leader. Therefore, this study support for better understanding of the importance of the role of individual personality differences in leadership behaviour. Hence, the findings of this study could be considered to improve the leadership personality traits which help for ethical leadership behaviour that employees admire and thereby improve the performance of workers in organizations.