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.

The challenge facing leaders in the 21st century is to restore stakeholder trust, build employee commitment, and create organizations that are able to sustain long-term competitive advantage. Great leadership combines both character and competence, but corporate values must include excellence and quality as well as integrity and honesty. Creating organizational systems that reinforce and support core values and that achieve outstanding performance must be founded upon principles that work on the street, in the office, and on the shop floor. Ethical leadership that honors a commitment to world class standards is a mandatory requirement for today's incredibly competitive global business environment, but ethical leadership encompasses far more than avoiding polluting the environment or misrepresenting product features to customers. This book clarifies the duties and obligations that leaders owe to their many stakeholders as they seek to create long-term wealth, but it also provides insights about how to build the organizational culture and systems required to sustain highly ethical organizations that inspire commitment and compete successfully.

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.

A practical guide for anyone called to be a good leader, Leadership Ethics & Spirituality explains why and how you can be both effective and ethical as a successful leader while walking by faith. From a biblical worldview, it draws upon leadership research and ethics theory to explain what practices and character qualities you need to be a good leader and how you can develop and apply them successfully to the challenges faced in twenty-first-century organizationseffectively, ethically, and with spiritual-mindedness. Although written primarily to Christian leaders, it offers useful insights for those from other spiritual traditions and perspectives as well.

This research is important because it empirically tests why ethical behavior by business and government leaders is essential for good management--which is to earn trust from customers and constituents--thus ensuring organizations are successful, for the greater good, over the long term, especially in the global marketplace. Law and morality are two standards by which business and government leaders are judged, but these norms fail whenever laws are not enforced and morality is disregarded. Five research questions on leadership are statistically tested, using a Likert-scale response measure questionnaire--based on “perceptions of societal corruption” and “trust levels,” using Bandura's “aggressive behavior modification theory,” as the model for analysis. Nigeria is selected as the location of this case study on leadership ethics and trust, because Nigerian government officials have a long history of unethical and corrupt behavior. Descriptive statistics, along with chi-square quantitative research methods reveals “perceptions of societal corruption” in Nigeria are high and “trust levels” for government leaders are very low. Leaders in Nigeria are only as ethical as the code-of-conduct prevalent in their country--where cultural, economic and legal factors contribute to the nation's corrupt society--which may cause Nigeria to become a failed state. To change the Nigerian culture of societal corruption--education is necessary--to instruct elected officials, civil servants, business leaders and Nigerian society, at large, on the importance of ethics and trust. Nigerian government and business leaders should institute an ethics policy--and implement five suggested reforms presented in this paper--which will help establish government leader's ethical integrity and improve citizens' trust and confidence in their government. Recommendations for future research on government and business leadership ethics and trust are offered.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which allows.

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.

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.