A Systemic Review: The Role of Ethical Leadership on Higher Ed Administrative Staff During a Pandemic

Due to the current COVID-19 global health pandemic, higher education, like many private and public organizations, faces new challenges, including a drastic drop in revenue, low enrollment, budget cuts, layoffs, low morale, and a new (remote) working model. Current literature focuses on ethical leadership and its influence on employee performance during planned change, which leaves a gap. There are no recommendations on how managers might lead effectively during a time of crisis. Through the lens of Bandura's (1977) social learning theory, a systematic review (SR) was conducted to understand the effects of ethical leadership on administrative employee performance during times of planned change and posit recommendations that could be applied from these practices to help higher ed administrators during a crisis. The evidence presented in this paper shows that ethical leadership fosters communication, trust, and employee motivation, which positively affects individual and organizational performance during times of change. From these results, the paper hypothesizes that it is too late to build a culture of ethical leadership during a crisis. But that higher education institutions that already embrace a culture of ethical leadership before a crisis will be able to weather the situation better than institutions that do not. Possible avenues for researching this hypothesis are suggested.