Developing ethical leadership for business organizations

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand the growing construct of ethical leadership and its related concepts that focus on the importance of the moral aspect of leadership. It focuses on the idea of ethical leadership, personality attributes of ethical leaders and develops a conceptual framework including various propositions related to the antecedents and outcomes of ethical leadership. Design/methodology/approach This is a review paper based on a synthesis of leadership literature from existing research journals and articles on ethical leadership. Authors analyzed selected papers on ethical leadership to propose a conceptual framework that shows the antecedents and outcomes of ethical leadership. Findings An ethical leader is one who strongly believes in following the right set of values and ideals in their decisions, actions and behavior. One has to be honest with high integrity, with people orientation and communicates assertively. Among the other attributes of an ethical leader, one needs to be responsible for taking unbiased decisions in benefit and overall interest of people and organization. This ethical leadership plays a vital role in developing positive outcomes such as followers’ organizational commitment and organizational identification. Trust in leadership can moderate this relationship. Practical implications This paper offers opportunities for researchers to explore discoveries in leadership style and also helps to understand the ways the organizations can develop ethical leaders at the workplace. An effective and efficient leader integrates ethics with leadership and thus makes its presence felt and emerges as a role model to play a more positive and valuable role in an organization. Originality/value This paper helps the strategist and educators to conceptualize ethical leadership and its framework including leaders’ ideal traits, similarities and differences of ethical leadership with other leadership styles and its role in developing positive outcomes in an organization. It presents a framework of ten testable propositions about ethical leadership that are relevant for both the practitioners and the scholars.

How does organizational leadership contribute to the firm performance through social responsibility strategies?

“…Following the success of research in the academic, companies also gradually started to redress their ethical misdemeanor to be more conscious about their social responsibility in the eyes of the society, as recently consumers would not let companies to be more careless about the environment and society health ( Ahmad and Gao, 2018 ; Tu and Lu, 2016 ). Accordingly, scholars should give more clarification on the crucial role of leaders in organizations to improve the firm's performance by applying and strengthening different environmental and social practices in organizations ( Saha et al., 2020 ; Sharma et al., 2019 ). One of those practices could be CSR with a growing research interest in recent years as it tries to meet the stakeholders' ethical demand as well as economics goals of the organization ( Robinson et al., 2011 ).…”

A Focussed Literature Review of Power and Influence Leadership Theories

“…More recent literature has made similar claims. [47,48] In the modern context, ethical leadership draws upon multiple ethical theories to equip leaders to unpack and consider their work's ethical dimensions through various lenses to arrive at a well-considered decision. Importantly, ethical leadership requires leaders' consistency to act and ethically lead, whether it is apparent to the follower group or not.…”

Becoming morally disengaged: how long does it take?

“…Although the ethical dimension in leadership remained neglected for a long time (Yukl, 2012) due to recent scandals and increasing leadership derailments (e.g. Mayer et al , 2010; Sharma et al , 2019) it gained momentum and became of critical importance in current leadership research (e.g. Bedi et al , 2016; Mharapara et al , 2019).…”

“…The leader's moral values and ethics are a fundamental dimension of organizations as they have been related to misuse of power, which ultimately has been linked to organizational scandals (e.g. Sharma et al , 2019). Such scandals are not the sole production of unethical leaders' conduct but, likewise, the collective result of followers' ethical behavior and attitudes (Padilla et al , 2007).…”