Ethics and Organizational Leadership

Abstract

Much has been written about leadership during the last eighty years, but little attention has been paid to leadership's ethical dimension. This book sets out to redress the balance and develop an understanding of what comprises ethical leadership in organizations. The book begins by drawing together relevant aspects of leadership theory and discussing them from an ethical perspective. It then offers a clear discussion of a range of ethics theories from the Anglo-American and European philosophical traditions, examining their implications for the study of leadership. It also considers ethics from the viewpoint of practising business leaders, using empirical data to illuminate some points raised during the earlier theory chapters. In the process, the book identifies a number of themes that relate to ethical leadership. It suggests that the route to ethical leadership lies in capitalizing on the moral upsides of these themes whilst avoiding their corresponding downsides. The book proposes that a consultative rather than directive leadership style is best placed to achieve this. However, it is also suggested that, in meeting these normative criteria, leaders need to go beyond the superficial, contingent prescriptions for democratic responsiveness that suffuse leadership and management theory. The book reflects on what it might take for such a model to be realized in contemporary, Western organizations, highlighting some challenges that this would present to conventional, managerialist expectations of leadership along with some possible enablers of consultative leadership

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.