Perceived Executive Leader’s Integrity in Terms of Servant and Ethical Leadership on Job Burnout among Christian Healthcare Service Providers:Test of a Structural Equation Model

Integrity is a key component in the definition of servant and ethical leadership, and honesty, authenticity, sincerity, respect and righteousness are major virtues and descriptors that make up this leadership integrity. Many leadership studies indicate that the lack of integrity from a leader, as well as the perception of the lack thereof, will exhaust the employees' exhilaration, degrade their physical and psychological health, and lead to frustration, fatigue and anxiety. For human service professions, this has become an occupational hazard for human service professions and is regarded as the last straw for workers, causing people to burnout and quit their jobs. 325 Full-time employees of the Metroplex Adventist Hospital were surveyed. Structural Equation Model (SEM) analysis showed that a leader's integrity offers two virtues: perceived positive integrity behavior and perceived negative integrity behavior, both of which significantly correlated with job burnout in terms of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment. Excluding ethnic backgrounds, some of the most significant demographic variables to determine a leader's integrity and job burnout include Years of Service, gender and age. Employees with income below $29,999, have 1-5 years of service, who are Asian, and are of female gender have experienced the highest score of job burnout and perceived highest score of negative integrity behavior and lowest score of perceived positive integrity behavior.