Ethical Leadership and Employee Moral Disengagement in Nigerian Public Sector Organisations: The Role of Ethical Work Climate

This study examines the relationship between ethical leadership and employee moral disengagement in Nigerian public sector organisations, with ethical work climate as a proposed mediating variable. Corruption and unethical conduct in Nigeria's public institutions are widely attributed to systemic governance failures, yet the role of leader ethical behaviour in shaping subordinate moral reasoning is a theoretically rich and empirically underexplored dimension of this challenge. The study draws on a sample of 220 civil servants from federal ministries in Abuja and state civil service commissions in Kogi and Ondo States. Instruments include Brown and Trevino's Ethical Leadership Scale, Bandura's Moral Disengagement Scale adapted for organisational contexts, and Victor and Cullen's Ethical Work Climate Questionnaire. Social Learning Theory and Social Cognitive Theory provide the theoretical grounding. PROCESS macro bootstrap mediation is used for hypothesis testing. Findings reveal that ethical leadership negatively and significantly predicts employee moral disengagement, and that this relationship is significantly mediated by ethical work climate. Leaders who model ethical conduct create work climates that discourage moral disengagement mechanisms such as diffusion of responsibility, euphemistic labelling, and advantageous comparison. The study also finds that in departments with longer-serving civil servants, the ethical leadership-climate path is stronger, suggesting habituation to ethical modelling over time. Recommendations include formalising ethical leadership criteria in public sector appraisals and creating departmental ethics committees. Keywords: Ethical Leadership, Moral Disengagement, Public Sector, Ethical Climate, Nigeria.