Background: Ethical leadership focuses on the way that managers and supervisors use social power in their decision-making and workplace actions and how they affect and influence others. The main purpose of the present study is to design a model of ethical leadership styles in Iranian public agencies.
Method: This study is an applied research in terms of purpose, and is descriptive survey based on its implementation. Statistical population of this research includes 20 experts and managers and also 812 employees of the tax administration west Azarbaijan province. From this statistical population, 250 individuals were selected randomly as a statistical sample. Data were collected by a questionnaire and analyzed by analytic hierarchy AHP, correlation analysis and factor analysis.
Results: The results show that from the perspectives of experts, role modeling and the perspectives of employees, outstanding traits have the significant impact on ethical leadership. By comparing leadership attributes with ethical leadership styles, we conclude that the facilitator leadership style with the characteristics of people-oriented and community-based, imperative with individual features, convincing with outstanding traits, inspiring with role modeling have the highest correlation.
Conclusion: According to research results, role modeling and outstanding traits such as integrity and transparency are important dimensions in ethical leadership and in the public sector; according to the characteristics of different ethical leadership we can use different leadership styles.