Leadership Ethics

Are leaders morally special? Is there something ethically distinctive about the relationship between leaders and followers? Should leaders do whatever it takes to achieve group goals? Leadership Ethics uses moral theory, as well as empirical research in psychology, to evaluate the reasons everyday leaders give to justify breaking the rules. Written for people without a background in philosophy, it introduces readers to the moral theories that are relevant to leadership ethics: relativism, amoralism, egoism, virtue ethics, social contract theory, situation ethics, communitarianism, and cosmopolitan theories such as utilitarianism and transformational leadership. Unlike many introductory texts, the book does more than simply acquaint readers with different approaches to leadership ethics. It defends the Kantian view that everyday leaders are not justified in breaking the moral rules.

This book offers new and challenging approaches to business ethics that successfully link theory and practice thereby overcoming lacunae and inadequacies in much of the literature concerning ethics and governance, a theme that recurs with remarkable frequency in the history of business ethics as an academic discipline. This work provides imaginative and innovate proposals for the indispensable coupling of virtue, integrity, and character with global business, finance, and banking. The volume seeks to overcome the marginal status of business ethics in universities, business, and enterprise by demonstrating that virtue ethics is an important step in the direction of an adequate response to the leadership issue. This new edition of a popular work points to new ways of achieving an ever more urgent coalescence of ethics and business. It proposes practical advice and viable suggestions to business people on what is right and wrong in business. The volume makes a vital contribution in the area of education that should serve the ongoing development of top leaders. In the important domain of women in leadership, the volume provides new solutions that break boundaries on the global stage. The work challenges unethical marketing of human images with important implications for citizenship and society. The volume contains creative suggestions for the use of spirituality and human development for the enhancement of business and society. The significantly extended second edition includes an exciting line up of leading academics and practitioners in the audacious hope that something may change for the better in the realms of business and banking.

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.

Everybody involved in sport, from the bleachers to the boardroom, should develop an understanding of ethics. Sport ethics prompt discussion of the central principles and ideals by which we all live our lives, and effective leadership in sport is invariably ethical leadership. This fascinating new introduction to sport ethics outlines key ethical theories in the context of sport as well as the fundamentals of moral reasoning. It explores all the central ethical issues in contemporary sport: from violence, hazing, and gambling to performance enhancement, doping, and discrimination. This book not only investigates the ethical, social, and legal underpinnings of the most important issues in sport today, but also introduces the reader to the foundations of ethical leadership in sport and discusses which leadership strategies are most effective. Each chapter includes original real-world case studies, learning exercises, and questions to encourage students to reflect on the ethical problems presented. Sport, Ethics and Leadership is an essential resource for any course on sport and leisure studies, the ethics and philosophy of sport, or sport and leisure management.

How do leaders influence others? Although they sometimes appeal directly to good reasons, which we associate with rational persuasion, leaders also use guilt, pressure, flattery, bullying, and rewards and punishment—all to get the behaviors that they want. Even when leaders refrain from outright lying, they are nevertheless known to practice something approaching, perhaps reaching, the level of manipulation. Influence therefore presents a serious ethical problem across leadership contexts. Leadership and the Ethics of Influence argues that influence puts leaders at risk of using people. It is generally disrespectful of autonomy to figure out what makes people "tick" in an effort to "handle" them. In contrast with physical force, influence works through agency, not around it. Despite this feature of influence—and, to a large extent because of it—the everyday influence associated with leadership is often morally troublesome. What matters morally is not only whether agency is bypassed or overridden but also who is ultimately in control. This book uses philosophy and leadership studies to show how leaders across different contexts can be justified in getting followers to do things. Connecting moral theory to leadership theory, and especially to charismatic leadership, authentic leadership, transforming leadership, and ethical leadership, this book is essential reading for leadership scholars, students, and practitioners.

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.

Top academic scholars ponder the question of ethics as it pertains to all aspects of leadership in business, government, and nonprofit organizations. If leaders were defined by their influence on history, Hitler would be on par with Gandhi, Lincoln, and Mother Theresa. Yet most of us believe that our superiors have a responsibility to exercise power with a purpose far greater than any political agenda and a motive more noble than personal gain. This thought-provoking collection of essays explores the ethical challenges that leaders face in their relationships with followers, the choices they make, and the ways in which they influence others. Joanne Ciulla and her contributors examine the traits and characteristics of top-tier leaders. She questions the assumption that moral fortitude is an inherent part of being in charge; analyzes the roles that charisma, morality, and delegation play in the leadership paradigm; and considers whether individuals who want to lead with integrity but are sometimes forced to get their hands dirty for their constituents can be called "moral leaders." Readers will gain an appreciation for how ethics is not an add-on to the practice of leadership but rather an integral part of it—an element that informs the very idea of what it means to lead and to lead well.