Leadership Ethics And Trust

The 21st century has seen leaders of all types failing in their efforts to earn the respect, trust, and confidence of their employees, customers, and society. This unique book explains how and why leaders fail to earn the trust of others and why ethics, integrity, and moral behaviour are so critically important for leaders of today and tomorrow. More importantly, it also provides a perspective for helping leaders to understand how they can earn the trust, followership, commitment, and extra-role behaviour so critical for success in today’s globally competitive work world.

The Ethical Leader showcases the necessity and practicality of using an ethics-based business model for competitive advantage and long-term organizational success. Ethical behaviour by businesses, or their staff, is often seen as the corporate and social responsibility icing on an organizational cake – something that is nice to do but never really essential. But by turning this view around – and making ethical behaviour a primary focus – Witzel shows how businesses can create and maintain long-term competitive advantage. Trust and respect among key stakeholder groups, particularly employees and customers, cannot be overstated in their importance to an organization's success: trust engenders loyalty and good reputation, which in turn builds brand value. However, while ethical behaviour is key to trust-building, in order for an organization to see lasting, positive outcomes it needs to go deeper than something managers do out of a sense of moral duty. The Ethical Leader shows why ethical practice has to be the platform on which a strong and enduring business can be built, and leaders and managers need to provide the necessary tools and insights to enable this to happen. Witzel offers a practical introduction to some of the key concepts in ethics, including how to deal with ethical paradoxes and making ethical decisions. The book explores the specifics of what makes an ethical leader, and how leaders can communicate values and standards across an organization in order to engage the trust of employees, consumers, shareholders and the wider community.

Increase your competitive advantage by taking a proactive approach to ethics-this book provides a road map for corporate leaders that show you how. Ethical Leadership will inspire your organization to elevate the level of its relationships with stakeholders and key constituents. It provides a powerful wake-up call that can result in higher revenues and more enduring relationships with customers, employees, and stakeholders. Ethical Leadership is full of steps and strategies to help organizations take a hard look at the way they do business, decide what changes are required, and transform principles into action.

Understanding the dynamics of trust is an imperative undertaking for educational leaders. In this book, using an ecological perspective of the lifecycle, the authors situate trust as an essential ingredient of school leaders’ moral agency and ethical decision making. Based on their 15 years of research on trust in education, the authors describe the nature and dimensions of trust, its importance and imperative, and its fragility and usefulness for school leaders, positioning them as trust brokers in school organizations.

Perhaps the fundamental question in CSR is: What are the responsibilities of businesses and business leadership to society? Moreover, do the responsibilities of business change in times of social and political turmoil? The chapters in this book tackle several aspects of these questions with chapters on business and politics, the environment, technology, and immigration; along with broader questions about leadership, governance, and the very nature of CSR.

Ethical leadership has come to the forefront of management thought in the twenty-first century in the wake of breaches of judgement and integrity that have plagued international markets. This volume assembles an international cadre of management scholars to explore questions surrounding ethical leadership. Using a variety of methods and approaches, this collection of studies examines how people determine the ethicality of their leaders, the complex connection of trust and those perceptions, and how that affects positive employee outcomes in the private and public sectors. Issues are explored both from the standpoint of behaving unethically and behaving ethically at the individual and firm levels. The diversity of approaches and penetrating insight makes this a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of ethics and leadership. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Change Management.

This new book identifies insights about the ethical issues associated with trust and trustworthiness, and their relationship to the leader's obligations as an ethical steward. The purpose of this book is to identify the importance of trust and trustworthiness in the "Transformative Era," a time when constant change and the increasing demands of customers make it paramount for organizations to obtain the commitment, followership, and extra-role behaviors required to compete in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous global marketplace. Unfortunately, leaders today have failed to earn the trust of others by creating arms-length transactional relationships that destroy employee commitment. This book frames the characteristics of the "Transformative Era" and explains how leaders can restore the trust that they have lost by honoring the steward's obligation to create long-term wealth and serve the interests of all stakeholders.In a world where 71% of all employees are actively looking for new job opportunities and only 16% of employees worldwide describe themselves as "actively engaged" in their work, the importance of reframing the employer-employee relationship demands immediate attention. This book identifies the conditions which make up today's "Transformative Era" and explains how and why leaders destroy trust in the modern organization. It then identifies how leaders can adopt a Transformative Approach to creating organizations that are prepared to survive the turmoil of the modern economy.

The impact of the global financial crisis is still being felt today and the deeply unethical behaviour of the top level leaders at those economic and financial organizations, that were at the heart of the crisis, has served to highlight the importance of integrity, and in particular the need for servant leadership, if we are to avoid another major catastrophe in the management of both commercial and non-profit organizations. Servant leadership has many features in common with transformational leadership but is primarily focused on caring about employees and their personal development. Ethical behaviour is one of the most important components of successful leadership yet this remains insufficiently investigated, especially from an interdisciplinary perspective. With the help of theory, empirical analysis and the relevant methodological apparatus, the authors fill the gap in the analysis of integrity and its impact on leadership and locate the significant factors which affect integrity in general. They develop and assess the forces that impact Servant Leadership style, as well as the ability to engender trust. As a starting point they make two assumptions: An important element in leading is the ethical dimension of leadership; The ratio of factors that affect leading and the servant leadership style is complex, but the integrity of leaders is the most important among them. The authors examine four integrated scientific areas: ethics and business ethics, human resource management and psychology and focus on the analysis of the process of leadership and the factors within that process of leading that influence its success and its ethical dimension.