Ethical Leadership as a Catalyst for Positive Relationships: How Fairness and Trust Encourage Knowledge Sharing in Audit Firms

In knowledge-intensive professions such as auditing, positive workplace relationships are essential to effective performance. Yet, the specific mechanisms through which ethical leadership encourages critical, collaborative behaviours, such as knowledge sharing, remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by examining how organisational justice and interpersonal trust serve as dual pathways that translate ethical leadership into the sharing of knowledge within audit teams. Using a cross-sectional survey design, data were collected from 232 auditing professionals in Iran and analysed via Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The results confirm that ethical leadership is significantly associated with promoting knowledge sharing. More importantly, this relationship is robustly mediated by both organisational justice and trust, revealing a dual-channel mechanism through which leadership exerts its influence. The primary contribution of this research lies in empirically demonstrating this integrated model, illustrating that ethical leaders foster collaboration not only through direct influence but by systematically cultivating a fair and trustworthy work environment. For audit firms and similar professional service organisations, these findings highlight the practical importance of developing leaders and HR policies that explicitly and consistently prioritise fairness and trust-building to strengthen team dynamics and enhance the flow of knowledge.