Responsible Leadership And Ethical Decision Making

The volume brings to life a number of the conference themes including corporate social responsibility, culture, academic integrity, vulnerability, health, military ethics, education, leadership, sustainability and philosophy and addresses concerns of many leading applied ethicists.

Until now, there has only been a shallow understanding of how the leadership actions of project managers interact with ethics and social responsibility. Empirical research into this subject has been sparse. Responsible Leadership, by Nicholas Clarke, Alessia D’Amato, Malcolm Higgs, and Ramesh Vahidi is the first study to investigate how the relationships among managers, team members, and other stakeholders can bring about personal and ethical conflicts that impact decision making.In this groundbreaking book, the authors explore how those who serve as leaders on projects can exercise their roles in ways that respond to the ever-increasing need for ethical decision making. They examine the factors that enable and constrain responsible leadership, looking at the issues faced by project managers as they interact with team members and other stakeholders. Responsible Leadership also provides new insights into how project managers view the moral implications of conflicts that occur as they conduct their work and is a valuable addition to the project management toolkit.

These chapters on ‘Responsible Leadership’ represent the latest thinking on a topic of increasing relevance in a connected world. There are many challenges that still remain when it comes to establishing responsible leadership both in theory and practice. Whilst offering conceptualisations for the improvement of leadership is a first and perhaps easier response, what is more difficult is to facilitate the actual change to happen. These chapters will not only generate interest in the emerging domain of studies on responsible leadership, but also will pave the way for future research in this area in the years to come. Previously Published in the Journal of Business Ethics, Volume 98 Supplement 2, 2011​

Maximizing productivity without regard for human consequences, the quest for profit above all else, the stifling of individual personality and creative expression, a competitive atmosphere-these are the reigning features of the modern workplace. Although many writers have called attention to the debilitating effects of this dehumanization of the working environment, solutions have been less in evidence. In The Anatomy of Ethical Leadership, Lyse Langlois frames the problem in terms of ethics, pointing to the fact that managers are often uncertain how to integrate ethical considerations into their process of decision making. She explores the instrumental, often highly legalistic patterns of thought that pervade modern organizations and proposes instead a new emphasis on dialogue and on modes of reasoning that make room for the complexity of ordinary reality. To that end, she outlines a trajectory for ethical, responsible, and authentic decision making--the TERA model-that managers --

Ethical leadership does not simply emerge from a code of conduct, a good school, or a host of good intentions. It is an individual choice, or rather a series of choices that emerges from the complex interaction of personal values with social imperatives. This book explores how and why some people become ethical leaders in morally challenging and complex social environments. In Ethical Leadership, Aidan McQuade provides insight into the concept of human agency – the individual’s choice of a course of action in response to the options posed by that individual’s engagement with the social world. He puts forth a new model of human agency – the "cruciform of agency" – which recognises that the potential range of individual action emerges from the nature of the resonance that social options strike with personal thoughts. Every action adds to the individual’s personal biography in ways that influence subsequent choices by confirming or changing personal values and hopes, hence influencing the way the individual subsequently thinks about the world. In explaining the potential and limits of human agency for ethical leadership, the book establishes a basis for executives, policy makers and academics to conceptualise and develop more robust and realistic approaches for the mitigation of some of the most pressing moral issues facing humanity today. These include the inter-related challenges of modern slavery and global warming, which pose such critical threats to the Earth itself. In this book McQuade not only sets an agenda for action but empowers individual leaders to find the moral courage to better advance human rights and preserve the environment even when such action requires unpopular choices.

Uses psychological and philosophical frameworks to teach readers how to make strategic, principled decisions as they lead with values.