According to the study's findings, there is no substantial association between ethical leadership

and employee engagement. Several studies have demonstrated that promotion emphasis
functions as a major triggering mechanism in shaping an employee's attitude and conduct,
lending credence to the study's findings (De Cremer et al., 2009). Employees are driven by
leadership actions that match with their ideal or ought selves, which either strengthens or
weakens work outcomes, according to promotion emphasis theory (De Cremer et al., 2009;
Kark and Van Dijk, 2008). However, the extent to which promotion emphasis interacts with
ethical leadership to predict job engagement remains unknown in the ethical leadership
research.
Furthermore, Breevaart, K., Bakker, A. B., Demerouti, E., and Derks, D. conducted a multilevel
structural equation modeling study on leadership, work engagement, and job performance
(2016). When leaders employed more transformational leadership behaviors and people used
more self-leadership tactics, employees were more interested in their job and obtained higher
performance evaluations from their leaders. Furthermore, it also revealed that transformational
leadership behaviors were more successful when workers had a high (vs. low) demand for
leadership, but employee self-leadership was the reverse. These findings contribute to our
knowledge of the role of employee in the transformative leadership process. This also
demonstrated that the significant link between transformational leadership and employee
engagement serves as evidence for the lack of a significant association between ethical
leadership and employee engagement in this study.

References:

Bakker, A. B., Breevaart, K., , Demerouti, E., & Derks, D. (2016). Who takes the lead? A multi‐
source diary study on leadership, work engagement, and job performance. Journal of
Organizational Behavior, 37(3), 309-325.

Chang, S. C., Cheng, J. W Kuo, J. H., & Cheung, Y. H. (2014). Ethical leadership, work
engagement, and voice behavior. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 114(5), 817-831.