Ethical leadership and SME performance in Malaysia’s ICT sector - a resource-based view of leadership effectiveness as a mediator
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This study investigates the impact of ethical leadership on organizational performance among Malaysian ICT SMEs, focusing on the mediating role of leadership effectiveness. It explores how leadership behaviors, typically defined in Western contexts, function within a non-Western, emerging economy setting. Design/methodology/approach The study incorporates a thorough literature review to conceptualize ethical leadership as a one-dimensional construct and positions leadership effectiveness as an emerging paradigm. Organizational performance is evaluated based on growth and profitability metrics. Data were collected from 675 SMEs in the ICT sector, and the proposed model was rigorously tested using exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling. Findings Results indicate a positive relationship between ethical leadership and organizational performance, and similarly between leadership effectiveness and organizational performance. Moreover, leadership effectiveness was found to mediate the link between ethical leadership and organizational performance. Practical implications The findings highlight the value of ethical leadership coupled with a focus on leadership effectiveness as strategies for enhancing organizational performance. These insights offer actionable guidance for SMEs aiming to improve performance and contribute to broader economic growth. Originality/value This study contributes to SME literature by integrating the RBV with leadership research and demonstrating how ethical leadership, as an intangible resource, drives performance in emerging markets. The use of a Western-developed measurement tool, adapted to a Southeast Asian context, adds methodological novelty and cross-cultural insight. This study contributes a novel leadership-performance model for SMEs in emerging economies, advancing both ethical leadership theory and practical leadership development in ICT service sectors.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".