The paper examines the construct of ethical leadership. Ethical leaders think about long-term consequences, drawbacks and benefits of the decisions they make in the organization. They are humble, concerned for the greater good, strive for fairness, take responsibility and show respect for each individual. Ethical leaders set high ethical standards and act in accordance with them. They influence ethical values of the organization through their behaviour. Leaders serve as role models for their followers and show them the behavioural boundaries set within an organization. They are perceived as honest, trustworthy, courageous and demonstrating integrity. The more the leader “walks the talk”, by translating internalized values into action, the higher level of trust and respect he generates from followers.

Human values are individual characteristics that vary in importance and serve as guiding principles in a person's life. The purpose of this paper is to identify the values held today by Slovenian managers and students and contributes to the few studies that have examined the influence of age on values. The exploratory study comprises 130 managers and 118 students majoring in management. The managers highly value health, family happiness, honesty, freedom and wisdom, whereas the students perceive as the most important good friends, knowing oneself, health, freedom, loyalty and family happiness.

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Knowledge is a category that includes many past decisions. They could be good for the past but it is a question if they can work in the future. We can talk about programmed and non-programmed decisions. When a predetermined situation triggers a predetermined response we can talk about a programmed decision. If one wants to make a non-programmed decision he/she must search for information, identify the problem, evaluate possible alternatives, and act. If the process is more complicated, programmed decision will be more effective. Our research has revealed that future managers in Slovenia possess knowledge that involves more programmed that non-programmed decisions. This may indicate that they will have a lot of difficulties with decision making in complicated organisational systems. However, they cannot learn how to take decisions (even if they want to) because they do not know what they actually need. If they are successful at non-programmed decisions they want more knowledge from the same area; in fact they would need more knowledge about programmed decisions -and vice versa.

Znanje je kategorija, ki obsega tudi mnoge odločitve iz preteklosti. Te odločitve so bile dobre za preteklost, veliko vprašanje pa je, ali se bodo obnesle tudi v prihodnosti. Odločitve so lahko programirane ali neprogramirane. Kadar vnaprej določena situacija sproži vnaprej določen odziv, lahko rečemo, da je takšna odločitev programirana. Če pa hočemo sprejeti neprogramirano odločitev, moramo poiskati informacije, prepoznati problem, ovrednotiti možne alternative in začeti delovati. Če je proces bolj zapleten, bodo programirane odločitve bolj učinkovite. Za bodoče managerje v Sloveniji se zdi, da imajo znanje, ki obsega več programiranih odločitev kot neprogramiranih. Lahko sklepamo, da bodo imeli veliko težav z odločanjem v zapletenem organizacijskem sistemu. Tudi če se želijo naučiti pravilnega odločanja, se ne morejo, ker ne vedo, kaj potrebujejo. Če so dobri v neprogramiranjem odločanju, si želijo več znanja s tega področja. Dejansko potrebujejo nekaj znanja o programiranjem odločanju in obrnjeno.