Introduction
Individuals need attention and expect to be understood and respected in their workplace. They also like to belong to an organization in which honesty, righteousness and trustworthiness is the common culture. To create such a milieu, an ethical leader is required whose actions reflect his/her own ethical capabilities and honesty as well as dignity in all aspects of life[1]. In fact, ethical leadership includes administrative measures through which the dignity and rights of humans are respected and fulfilled[2]. Since ethical leadership plays an important role in creating a healthy work environment and improves organizational and individual outcome[3, 4], it is of great interest in leadership studies[5].
Ethical leadership is defined
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]n Iran’s nursing system, there are some challenges and limitations such as insufficiency of ethical knowledge, work overload, job dissatisfaction[9, 12, 13], which decreases compliance with ethical codes of conduct[12] and in turn the quality of nursing care[9, 13]. On the other hand recently, nursing ethics has been the subject of several research projects in Iran, suggesting procedures for higher compliance with principals of ethical conduction in professional nursing practice[7]. For example code of ethics for Iranian nurses was released by the Iranian Nursing Organization in 2010, containing national codes of conduct for ethical nursing [14]. A nursing ethical leader is considered as a role model for the other nurses; a person who works in the same context. He/she understands the work and ethics-related issues and helps to resolve them. He/she tries to create an ethical climate and improve ethical compliance in nursing practices. However, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to determine the characteristics of ethical leaders as the predicting variables of ethical leaders' personalities[4]. In this study, the work-related experiences of Iranian nurses were investigated to extract common features of the personality of ethical