How critical is ethical leadership during COVID? Its role in enhancing creativity in nursing
Abstract
Purpose
The ethical requirement for nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic reached the peak. Healthcare professionals were asked to provide creative services to patients while making ethical decisions. This study aims to understand how ethical leadership and ethical climate interact with help seeking behavior to influence nurses’ creativity.
Design/methodology/approach
In this longitudinal study, the authors employed 193 nurses from a large hospital in China. Eligible nurses completed two surveys (one month apart) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Findings
This study found that help seeking during problem-solving mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and creativity while ethical climate moderates the relationship between ethical leadership and help seeking in nurses.
Originality/value
Scholars have rarely studied the relationship between ethical leadership and creativity in the healthcare setting. More importantly, this study unveiled the compounded effect of ethical leadership and ethical climate on creativity via nurses’ help seeking behavior in China.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: This study was supported by the base of humanities and social science and logistics research center in University of Henan province under grant No. 2017-JD-04.
Conflict of interest: The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.
Author contributions: L.X.: conceptualization, methodology and writing. G.L.: data curation. J.G.: data curation and editing.
Citation
Xie, L., Li, G. and Gu, J. (2024), "How critical is ethical leadership during COVID? Its role in enhancing creativity in nursing", International Journal of Ethics and Systems, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOES-10-2023-0219
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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