Background: Unethical behavior of a leader can lead to the failure of ethics in organization. Therefore, the purpose of the present research was to study the relationship between ethical leadership with organizational citizenship behavior and testing the moderating effects of the perceived organizational policies and gender among the Urmia University staffs.
Method: This is a descriptive-correlation research. Participant comprised 225 members of Urmia University staffs. Data was collected using three standard questionnaires: ethical leadership, organizational citizenship behavior and organizational policies. Data was analyzed by using Pearson correlation coefficient, multiple simultaneous regression coefficients and hierarchical one.
Results: The results showed that there was a positive significant relationship between ethical leadership and organizational citizenship behavior. As a sequence, the results indicated that there was a negative significant relationship between organizational politics understanding and organizational citizenship behavior. Also, perceived organizational politics had a significant moderating effect on the relationship between ethical leadership and organizational citizenship behavior, but gender had no significant moderating effect in this relationship.
Conclusion: Based on these results we concluded that ethical leadership lead to promote the organizational citizenship behavior directly and reduce the policies in an organization. Also, with an emphasis on moderating role of perceived organizational politics, ethical leadership had a positive and meaningful effect on organizational citizenship behavior.