Ethical Leadership: A Systematic Literature Review and Bibliography

Abstract

Ethical leadership has a crucial role in shaping organizational culture, improving patient safety, and ensuring the quality of service, although scientific understanding of it is still limited. The absence of ethical leadership can have serious consequences, such as declining staff morale and the erosion of public trust. This study aims to map the ethical leadership research landscape in the health sector through a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify future research trends and potentials. Using the PRISMA method, article searches were conducted on the Scopus database (2020–2025) with the keywords "ethical" and "leadership", which were filtered by the areas of medicine, nursing, and health professions. A total of 11 relevant articles were analyzed using VOSviewer. The results show a very limited number of publications spread across 10 countries without a dominant study center. Keyword mapping highlights a strong relationship between ethical leadership and leadership (11), people (10), ethics (8) morality (6), maturity (6), gender (4), psychology (4) structural similarities (3) organizational modeling (3) social responsibility (3) healthcare (2) financing (2), work impact (2) organization (2) perception (2) motivation (2) safety (2) satisfaction (2). It is concluded that the study of ethical leadership in the health sector has great research potential, with significant theoretical and practical implications for improving governance and service quality.