Ethical Leadership and Normative Commitment: Drivers of Urban Land Service Quality in Bahir Dar City-Ethiopia

Abstract

Urban land service delivery is becoming a key source of public discontent in developing countries despite that it is the driving engine of the urban economy. This study aims at examining the influence of ethical leadership on the perceived quality of urban land service quality through the link of normative organizational commitment in Bahir Dar City. The study followed the positivist research paradigm in a quantitative research approach with a correlational research design. Participants of the study were urban land customers who are seeking urban land for residential house and business buildings. Perceived Leader Integrity Scale was adapted to measure ethical leadership. Normative commitment was measured using the Meyer and colleagues tool. Perceived service quality was measured employing the service quality scale, excluding customer expectations. Data were collected from convenience sample involving 346 customers. Structured questionnaires were employed using the five point Likert scale.  SEM-AMOS software was used to carry out the analysis. Findings indicated that ethical leadership has significant and positive influence on the Perceived service quality (β=0.476, R²=0.227) and the Employees’ normative commitment (β=0.499, R2= 0.249), partially mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and the perceived service quality (β=0.391, R²=0.15). The indirect effect (β=0.195, R²=0.038) supports the strong direct effect, yielding a total impact of β=0.671 (R²=0.450). This implies that appropriate ethical leadership practices and normative commitment contribute to improve urban land service quality.  The study suggests that urban land administration organizations need to adopt ethical leadership and normative commitment practices to improve the ever-increasing challenges of urban land services in the study area.