Background: There are many evidences about existence of crisis in ethical leadership and ethical decision making in almost all sectors of professional, social and organizational life: such as great companies ethical corruptions, financial bad performance and illegal activities and aggressive. Moreover, it is shown that the application of ethical leadership will gain a lot of positive results for organizations. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship of some personality characteristics with ethical leadership.

Methods: Research method is correlation. Population of the study was employees of a service organization in Ahvaz. Then, among all, 163 persons were selected as sample group randomly. Data were gathered by ethical leadership, NEO personality traits and internal locus of control questionnaires and analyzed by Pearson Correlation Coefficient and regression analysis.

Results: Results showed that there is a significant positive correlation between personality characteristics (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism and internal locus of control) with ethical leadership. Furthermore, regression analysis indicated that personality characteristics can significantly predict ethical leadership.

Conclusion: Ethical leadership is associated with some of personality characteristics. Therefore, organizations can use such personality characteristics in selection of individual.