Ethical Public Leadership

Designed to help midlevel and senior managers in organizations dedicated to public purposes, this book provides trained self-awareness to deploy values to guide decisions and build the culture of their organizations. The book explores how all managing involves leading and identifies the levels of ethical responsibility for managerial leaders. Highlighting the fundamental role that ethics plays in organizational life, J. Patrick Dobel uses insights from cognitive and social psychology to discuss how to anticipate and address threats to integrity and value informed decision making. Building on traditional ethical theory and modern research, the book begins with the fundamental assumption that individuals possess responsibility when they act for ethical purposes and results in taking a position within a public or nonprofit organization. This assumption of responsibility recognizes the inherent discretion in all positions and claims that effective ethical management requires self-awareness, self-mastery, integrity and a working frame of one’s values and character. The book pays special attention to the challenges of integrating diverse people and perspectives in public organizations as well as attending to the slippages to integrity in organizational life and how managers and leaders can foresee and address ethical slippage and corruption. The book provides checklists and decision frameworks that individuals can adopt and deploy to guide decisions. Public Leadership Ethics: A Management Approach will help create strong value informed cultures supported by communication, transparency, incentives and strong management cadres to achieve high quality service and integrity based actions. It will be of special interest to managerial leaders in public service and teaching in public administration and policy programs or executive training.

We live in a leadership crisis. "In an age when incompatible worlds collide and when scandals rock formerly stable institutions," says Walter Fluker, "what counts most is ethical leadership and the qualities of personal integrity, spiritual discipline, intellectual openness, and moral anchoring." Fluker finds these characteristics exemplified in the work and thought of black-church giants Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard Thurman. This volume, for leaders and emergent leaders in religious and other settings, sets forth the context and principles for ethical leadership, particularly for ministries and other professions whose mission directly advances the common good. Fluker's volume grounds leadership in story, the appropriation of one's roots, as a basis for personal and social transformation. He then explores the key values of character, civility, and community for ethical action on the personal, public, and spiritual realms. From these considerations he develops a model of the specific virtues that embody each realm of ethical leadership before applying them to the practical aspects of leadership and decisionmaking.

In this book the authors examine the various orientations of leadership, and demonstrate that true, effective leadership is only achieved when it is consistent with ethical and moral values.

Dozens of books are published each year on leadership, but as pundits, scholars, philosophers, and public intellectuals note, what is written is too often shallow and facile, oriented toward quick fixes for performance enhancement or internal organizational and personnel development. Drawing from a diverse range of literature, including history, philosophy, public administration, leadership, religion, and spirituality, this book fills an important gap, exploring what it means to be an ethical and moral leader. It takes a deep dive into the many challenges of leadership, examining the continuing contrast between bureaucracy and democracy, the unique ethical and moral characteristics of nonprofit and faith-based organizations, and the globalization of organizations and institutions. Throughout the book, author Stephen M. King develops a more holistic and interdisciplinary understanding of ethical and moral leadership, required for more thoughtful theoretical and empirical research. He points students of leadership to the time-honored values of ethics and morality, reestablishes the ethical balance between bureaucracy and democracy, and helps reorient the values' purpose of public, nonprofit, and global institutions, providing hope of a better future for leadership. Ethical Public Leadership is required reading for students of public administration and nonprofit management, as well as for practicing public servants and nonprofit sector employees at all levels.

Ethics is at the heart of leadership. All leaders assume ethical burdens and must make every effort to make informed ethical decisions and foster ethical behavior among followers. The Sixth Edition of Meeting the Ethical Challenges of Leadership: Casting Light or Shadow explores the ethical demands of leadership and the dark side of leadership. Author Craig E. Johnson takes a multidisciplinary approach to leadership ethics, drawing from many fields of research to help readers make moral decisions, lead in a moral manner, and create an ethical culture. Packed with real-world case studies, examples, self-assessments, and applications, this fully-updated new edition is designed to increase students’ ethical competence and leadership abilities.

This book identifies six ethical competencies for public leadership in contexts of pluralism. While diversity in proximity generates conflict where people want and value different things, the right kind of leadership and the right kind of politics can minimise domination, humiliation, cruelty and violence. Written by a public policy advisor for fellow practitioners in politics and public life, this book applies political theory and social ethics to identify a set of competencies—being civil, diplomatic, respectful, impartial, fair and prudent—to keep ethics at the centre of a pluralist democratic politics. The six competencies are described in behavioural terms as personal resolutions. They offer valuable tools for mentoring and professional development. This book will appeal to politicians and those who advise them, and anyone who engages in or aspires to public leadership, whether in the public sector, the private sector, the community and voluntary sector or academia.

Radical Thoughts on Ethical Leadership, provides contributions from established scholars with fresh perspectives on ethical leadership, with challenging viewpoints that have been given little coverage in the literature to date. Radical Thoughts on Ethical Leadership includes theoretical perspectives that are founded on unconventional approaches—radical, “outside the box” ideas that would be difficult to get through the conventional journal review process. The volume brings together noted researchers from a variety of disciplines and explore non?mainstream approaches to ethics and social responsibility theory, research, and practice in both business and public administration. Grounded in the established literature and providing insight for researchers, managers/ administrators, or organizations at large, the volume establishes new paradigms for the field of ethical leadership.