Ethical leadership and staff retention in Uganda’s health care sector:

Abstract

This paper examined the mediating effect of job resources on the relationship between ethical leadership and staff retention in Uganda. Utilising a sample of 214 health care workers, a cross-sectional research design was adopted. SPSS v. 21 and Analysis of Moment Structure v. 21 were used in the data analysis. Job resources as a whole was established to be a partial mediator in the relationship between ethical leadership and staff retention. Ethical leadership and job resources individually predicted staff retention. Overall, 66% of the variance in staff retention is explained. As a limitation, data were collected in a cross-sectional survey, which might have confounded the causality among the studied variables. Future researchers could conduct longitudinal studies to address this limitation. The findings suggest that leaders need to be ethical in their dealings if they are to enhance the retention function of their staff in their respective organisations. Health care managers should endeavour to provide job resources in order to mitigate the effects of job overload so as to improve on staff retention in their organisations. This study finds support for job resources as a mediator in the relationship between ethical leadership and staff retention in Uganda’s health care sector. This is consistent with the requirements for the examination of process variables in relationships so as to make concrete inferences.