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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The world cries out for ethical leaders. We expect the best, but we are often left profoundly disappointed. While leadership programs may feature ethics as part of their curriculum, the approach is often either simplistic or overly esoteric. This second edition addresses this scarcity of resources for training ethical leaders, providing a primer of several ethical frameworks accompanied by extended examples to help inform decision-making. It also addresses several leadership models that claim an ethical component. The new edition also includes new chapters on the ethics of care and toxic leadership, and new case studies for all chapters. By providing a consistent case analysis based on the Five Components of Leadership Model, readers benefit from a comprehensive approach to understanding ethical leadership.

This invaluable resource explores situations that principals are likely to encounter and presents questions and issues to help them confront difficult ethical dilemmas.

This book links ethical leadership theory to the implementation of improved leadership practices, particularly in highly operational environments. It builds on the recognition that bad forms of leadership lead to declining motivation and consequently to problems in the social climate and quality of work in organizations and the personal health of employees. It is based on a qualitative study from 100 in-depth interviews using inductive categorization, retrieving deep, rich and unprompted data from a highly developed and advanced production facility. The book reviews the current state of research in this field and describes the setup of the underlying study, linking it to the author’s professional experience. It discusses the research design, its testing and its adaption to organizational practice. The book presents the findings of the study, introduces specific issues arising from the analysis, then critically discusses the interpretation of the findings and matches these with theoretical concepts. One finding of the study is that CSR and ethics are too often implemented with a focus on governance, process and reporting, without looking at leadership on all levels as the critical component. Finally it discusses the conclusions and implications derived from the findings. Overall, the book critically assesses how ethical leadership can be practically implemented in business organizations as a means of transforming organizations into better-governed institutions that exhibit ethical behavior. Foreword by Prof Dr James F. O'Kane, Dean of The Business School, Edinburgh Napier University /div