Ethical Leadership

What do we mean by ethical leadership?

Ethical leadership as the demonstration of appropriate conduct through personal actions and relationships and the promotion of such conduct to subordinates through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision making. (Dion, M. 2012)

We can’t really discuss ethical leadership without looking first at ethics. Ask 100 people or 100 philosophers, what they mean by ethics, and you might get 100 different answers.

Some of the different ways that the “ethics” is defined:

l Situational ethics - What’s right depends on the context of the situation. What’s right in one situation may be wrong in another.

l Cultural relativism - Whatever a culture deems right is ethical for that culture. No one has any right to judge the ethics of another culture except on its own terms.

l Professional ethics - Many professions – law, medicine, have their own specific codes of ethics, which all members of those professions are expected to follow. Members of those professions are considered ethical in their practice if they adhere to the code of their profession.

l Value-based ethics -The assumption here is that everyone has a set of values she lives by. A person is behaving ethically if her behavior matches her values.

l Ethics based on fairness - Ethical behavior consists in making sure everyone is treated fairly.(Palmer, D. E. 2009).

From my view, three key components of ethical leadership lead to success:  

1. Leaders become credible and authentic as ethical role models by engaging in ongoing behaviors that subordinates deem unselfish and ethically appropriate. These behaviors include being honest, showing consideration for others, and treating people fairly and with respect.

2. Ethical leadership requires emphasizing the importance and significance of ethics. Communicating about ethics on a consistent basis is a key component to ethical leadership; leaders who behave ethically but never talk to their subordinate about ethics will fall short in ethical leadership.

3. Ethical leadership entails creating ethical command climates that set the         conditions   for positive outcomes and ethically appropriate behavior and provide negative outcomes for inappropriate behavior.

  (Brown, M. E., Trevino, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. 2005).

How does effective ethical leadership affect people?

l Ethical leadership results in positive relationships between the leaders and their subordinates. Had a positive relationship with subordinates’ satisfaction with their leaders and their perceptions of how fairly their leaders treated them.

l Ethical leadership results in important behavioral outcomes as well.  subordinates to be more willing to report problems and to engage in higher levels of effort. Management and colleagues found that ethical leadership was associated with less unethical behavior and more positive helping and citizenship behavior by subordinates

From my past 10 years working experiences, I found that ethical leadership can spread through an organization all the way to the front lines. Front-line workers behaved more ethically and cooperatively when their immediate supervisors ranked high in ethical leadership. Even more interesting, ethical leadership in top management and leader teams predicted ethical and cooperative behavior of front-line employees and lower-level supervisors. This indicates that high or low ethical leadership from leaders at the very highest levels influenced leaders at lower levels, who in turn influenced the ethical behavior of everyone else.

Finally, and perhaps most important, an ethical leader never stops reexamining his own ethical assumptions and what it means to be an ethical leader. Like so many other important tasks, maintaining ethical leadership is ongoing; like only a few others, it can last a lifetime.

References

Dion, M. (2012). Are ethical theories relevant for ethical leadership? Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 33(1), 4-24. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/01437731211193098

Palmer, D. E. (2009). Business leadership: Three levels of ethical analysis. Journal of Business Ethics, 88(3), 525-536. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551-009-0117-x

Brown, M. E., Trevino, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117-134. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/223212415?accountid=164702