A working model towards cultivating ethical leadership among emerging directors in Zimbabwe: the case of the Banking Sector

Abstract

Zimbabwe's banking sector has experienced persistent governance failures, unethical decision-making, and reputational damage linked in significant part to leadership deficits among emerging directors. Despite the existence of regulatory frameworks and codes of conduct, no contextualised working model exists to guide the ethical development of directors in the formative early years of their careers. This study set out to address that gap directly. The existing literature on ethical leadership, including Brown et al. (2005) social learning framework and Rest's (1986) four-component model of moral development, provides a strong theoretical foundation but is predominantly anchored in Western institutional contexts. Kant's theory of ethics provided the philosophical lens for this study, emphasising duty, moral principle, and the intrinsic dignity of individuals as non-negotiable foundations of ethical conduct. The literature identifies political interference, nepotism, target-driven misconduct, and institutional silence as recurring governance challenges in the Zimbabwean business environment, yet stops short of providing a model capable of equipping emerging directors to navigate these challenges in practice. The study employed an interpretivist philosophy grounded in a constructivist ontology, recognising that ethical leadership is a contextual, human phenomenon that cannot be reduced to measurable outputs alone. An abductive research approach was adopted, combining deductive engagement with existing theory and inductive generation of new insights from the data. A multiple case study strategy was employed across five purposively selected commercial banks, reflecting the institutional diversity of the sector. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods design was used: structured questionnaires were administered to 66 emerging directors selected through stratified and simple random sampling from a population of 80, using the Krejcie and Morgan (1970) formula, yielding a response rate of 82.5%; qualitative open-ended responses were analysed through the thematic analysis framework. The findings revealed a significant gap between individual ethical intent and institutional ethical practice. Emerging directors demonstrated strong personal commitments to ethical behaviour. Still, they operated within environments characterised by normalised regulatory circumvention, distrusted whistleblowing channels, and incentive structures that rewarded financial output over ethical conduct. Five dominant ethical dilemmas were identified: political interference and stakeholder pressure (87.9%); nepotism and recruitment irregularities (77.3%); target-driven misconduct (71.2%); institutional silence (66.7%); and conflicts of interest (59.1%). Ethics training was found to be critically inadequate, with only 16.7% of respondents having received structured ethical leadership development and 37.9% having received none. The study concludes that ethical leadership deficits in Zimbabwe's banking sector are structural rather than individual in nature and cannot be resolved through compliance training alone. Based on the empirical findings, a three-level working model was developed comprising twelve components organised around the individual director, the institution, and the external regulatory environment. The model addresses moral courage, mentorship, independent accountability structures, contextualised ethical frameworks, psychological safety, and ethics-in-performance evaluation as its core institutional components. The study contributes a theoretically grounded, empirically derived, and contextually appropriate ethical leadership model, the first of its kind developed specifically for emerging directors in Zimbabwe's banking sector, with direct implications for bank governance, regulatory policy, and professional development practice. The main study limitation was the study's cross-sectional design, which captured director perceptions at a single point in time rather than tracking change, combined with reliance on self-reported data from a sample of 66 directors drawn from five banks; findings should therefore be interpreted with appropriate caution regarding generalisability beyond the Zimbabwean banking context.