Abstract

Purpose It is necessary for organizations to have committed employees to perform properly and be able to survive in a competitive world. One of the key components of organizational commitment is implementation of ethical leadership. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between ethical leadership and organizational commitment in fire organizations of Tehran. Design/methodology/approach A descriptive-correlational study was carried out in 2019. The sample consisted of 200 randomly selected participants, active in executive and headquarters divisions of fire department in Tehran. To collect data, a questionnaire with three different parts: demographics, organizational commitment questionnaire and the ethical leadership scale, was used. Data analysis were performed by AMOS24 and SPSS software, and data are presented as descriptive statistics of frequency, percentages, mean +/- standard deviation (SD) and Pearson's correlation coefficient. Findings Mean and SD for organizational commitment and ethical leadership were 3.44 +/- 0.7 and 3.66 +/- 0.62, respectively. Affective commitment had the highest average score among organizational commitment dimensions (3.63 +/- 0.75). Among ethical leadership dimensions, ethical management showed the highest average (3.79 +/- 0.70). Each component of organizational commitment, i.e. affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment, also showed a significant relationship with ethical leadership (p < 0.05). Model fit results revealed that independent variables could anticipate 87 of changes of dependent variables in organizational commitment. Originality/value The results show a significantly positive relationship between ethical leadership and organizational commitment among the firefighters. Therefore, by using ethical leadership method, i.e. being a role model, improving the relations between management and employees, establishing trust and mutual respect, managers of fire departments can increase firefighters' organizational commitment, affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment and prevent them from quitting.