Ethical leadership and sustainable employee wellbeing: the roles of emotional energy, moral signals, and psychological resources

Abstract

Concerns about employee wellbeing have intensified in increasingly demanding and morally complex workplaces, yet existing research offers fragmented explanations of how ethical leadership relates to sustainable psychological functioning. Prior studies frequently conflate short-term affective activation with broader adaptive capacity and rarely integrate leadership behavior and contextual moral signals within a unified analytical structure. Addressing these limitations, this study advances a differentiated psychological framework that analytically separates emotional energy (affective vitality) from psychological resources (relatively stable adaptive capacity) while modeling them simultaneously alongside ethical leadership and moral signals. Using cross-sectional survey data from 520 full-time employees and structural equation modeling with bootstrapped mediation tests, we examine the structural associations among these constructs. Results indicate that ethical leadership and moral signals are positively associated with emotional energy, which demonstrates the strongest direct association with sustainable wellbeing and significantly mediates the ethical leadership–wellbeing relationship. In contrast, psychological resources exhibit a more conditional and structurally nuanced pattern, suggesting that sustainable wellbeing may depend less on resource accumulation than on the stabilization of emotional expenditure within workplace interactions. By clarifying hierarchical distinctions among affective vitality, adaptive capacity, and contextual moral inputs, this study enhances conceptual precision in ethical leadership research and advances a structured account of sustainable employee wellbeing.