When Ethical Leadership Is Not Enough: A Person-Centred Analysis of Employee Strain and Turnover Intentions

Ethical leadership is usually examined through its consequences for employees, and it is often assumed that employees who rate their supervisor as ethical will also report lower strain and weaker intentions to leave. This study tests that assumption using a person-centred design. Survey data were collected from 247 shift-working employees of a single Turkish manufacturing organisation. Participants rated the ethical leadership of their immediate supervisor and reported their own job stress, perceived organisational support, turnover intention and career planning. Latent profile analysis identified four subgroups. Two of these are of particular interest: both report high ethical leadership and organisational support yet differ sharply in job stress (4.37 vs. 2.48) and turnover intention (4.10 vs. 2.18). This divergence helps explain why job stress is essentially unrelated to ethical leadership (r = 0.02, p = 0.820) and to perceived organisational support (r = 0.04, p = 0.492) at the bivariate level, while remaining strongly associated with turnover intention (r = 0.43, p < 0.001). Favourable evaluations of a supervisor therefore appear compatible with very different experiences of strain. Because the design is cross-sectional and all measures are self-reported by the same source, the findings describe patterns of association rather than causal processes. The results suggest that leadership-focused interventions alone may not address all sources of strain-related turnover intention and that job demands require separate assessment.