Ethical Leadership and Employee Proactivity: The Serial Mediation of Trust, Psychological Safety and Psychological Empowerment

Abstract

Background: Ethical leadership plays a crucial role in fostering employee proactive behavior by building trust, psychological safety, and psychological empowerment. Through these sequential psychological mechanisms, employees become more confident to take initiative and contribute to constructive organizational change. Purpose: This study investigates the relationship between ethical leadership and employee proactivity by examining the serial mediating roles of trust, psychological safety, and psychological empowerment. The study examined the how Trust mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and employee proactivity, psychological safety mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and employee proactivity. Although ethical leadership has attracted considerable scholarly attention, the sequential psychological mechanisms through which it fosters proactive employee behaviour remain insufficiently theorised and empirically tested, particularly within sub-Saharan African organisational contexts. Design/Methodology/Approach: A quantitative cross-sectional survey design was employed. Data were collected from 366 employees across public and private sector organisations in Ghana. Hypotheses were tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS 4.0. Both measurement and structural models were assessed, and serial mediation effects were examined using bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples. Findings: Ethical leadership positively predicted employee proactivity both directly (β = 0.18, p < .001) and indirectly through multiple mediating pathways. The full serial mediation path (ethical leadership → trust → psychological safety → psychological empowerment → employee proactivity) was significant (β = 0.04, p < .001, 95% CI [0.02, 0.06]). The model accounted for 51% of the variance in employee proactivity. The findings demonstrate that ethical leadership influences proactivity both directly and through a cascading psychological pathway. Trust serves as the relational foundation, enabling psychological safety, which in turn fosters psychological empowerment and ultimately drives proactive behaviour. Conclusion: The study advances Social Exchange Theory by specifying a cascading psychological mechanism linking ethical leadership to proactive behaviour. It provides robust contextual evidence from Ghana, enhancing the cross-cultural generalisability of ethical leadership research. The organisations should invest in ethical leadership development programmes that go beyond general leadership training to specifically target integrity, fairness, and two-way communication competencies.