What Is Ethical Leadership and Can It Survive?
A discussion on ethical leadership
“In a perfect world, it’s always clear what’s right or wrong. In the real world, things are often not so clear.
Someone’s wrong can be your right, which means your right will definitely, at some point, be someone else’s wrong. Most of the time the “right” choice can be subjective.
At some point in our careers, most of us will have to make tricky ethical decisions. How do you examine the issue and figure out what to do?” (Giang, 2015)
There’s a growing interest in ethical leadership, but there’s also considerable disagreement about the appropriate ways to define it and measure it.
“The primary issue is not whether leaders will use power, but whether they will use it wisely and well.” (Gini, 1998)
Heifetz stated that “there is no ethically neutral ground for theories of leadership because they always involve values and implicit assumptions about proper forms of influence” (Heifetz, 1994).
To understand and try to answer these questions, it’s important to examine ethical leadership as follows:
- Conceptions of ethical leadership