Leadership & ethics cs | Reading homework help

6. Is the proposed course of action consistent with my values and principles?

Effective leaders are often confronted with impossible dilemmas, where no ideal resolution exists. In such situation leaders need to make difficult decisions that involve sacrificing some goods for the sake of promoting others. A classic example is the decision to go to war, knowing that many people, including civilians, will die. Sometimes this dilemma is known as the dirty hands problem. Becoming an ethical leader The issue of ethical leadership is an ancient one. For example, Aristotle argued that the ethical person in a position of leadership embodies the virtues of courage, temperance, generosity, self- control, honesty, sociability, modesty, fairness, and justice. To Confucius, wisdom, benevolence and courage are the core virtues. Applying ethics to leadership and management, Velasquez (1992) has suggested that managers develop virtues such as perseverance, public-spiritedness, integrity, truthfulness, fidelity, benevolence, and humility. Ethical leadership is also associated with the African concept of the sage. Henry Odera Oruka (1944-1995), from Kenya, researched sage traditions of Sub-Saharan Africa and provided an account of wisdom that is distinctly African. The contemporary South African author Reul Khoza provided accounts of ethical leadership from the perspective of Ubuntu which, among other things, feature a communitarian account of virtue originating in Africa. The philosopher Al-Farabi (872-950) provides us insights into ethical leadership from an Islamic perspective. He was born somewhere in modern day Central Asia, and moved throughout the great cities of the Islamic world, such as Baghdad and Damascus. His philosophy was wide ranging, but his insights on leadership can be found in his writings on ethics and politics. In those works, including his famous book The Virtuous City, Al-Farabi argued that leaders should also be philosophers, an idea he drew from the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato. For Al-Farabi, this meant that a leader must not just be a person of action and power, but one who reflects upon what is best for the community which he or she governs. Unlike Plato, he argued that the best city was not a monocultural one, but one which embraced diversity, and the wisest leaders found ways in which peoples of different races and beliefs could live together. Other thinkers have emphasized other sets of virtues, but the differences are not as big as one might think. In fact, people from various cultures may have quite similar views on essential virtues. Regarding the development of virtues, according to the Aristotelian way, when virtues are practiced over time, from youth to adulthood, good values become habitual, and part of the people themselves. By telling the truth, people become truthful; by giving to the poor, people Page | 6 become benevolent; by being fair to others, people become just. The Confucian way of cultivating oneself begins with obtaining a deep knowledge of how the world works, moves through taking certain actions and ends with one's most ambitious goal - to illustrate virtue throughout the world. This is strongly connected to the idea that 'knowing', 'doing' and 'being' are three interrelated components of an ethical person. In The Great Learning, written around 500 B.C., and the first of four books selected by Zhu Xi during the Song Dynasty as a foundational

introduction to Confucianism, Confucius described the process as follows:

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things. Treviño, Hartman and Brown (2000) argue that ethical leadership comprises two aspects: the "ethical person" and the "ethical manager". One must first be an ethical person in order to become an ethical manager. The managerial aspect refers to a leader's intentional efforts to influence others and guide the ethical behaviour of followers - such as communicating ethical standards and disciplining employees who behave unethically. Ethical leadership relies on a leader's ability to focus the organization's attention on ethics and values and to infuse the organization with principles that will guide the actions of all employees. Treviño and others also identify three measures that effective ethical managers usually take. First, they serve as a role model for ethical conduct in a way that is visible to employees. Second, they communicate regularly and persuasively with employees about ethical standards, principles and values. Third, they use the reward system consistently to hold all employees accountable to ethical standards. The context in which leaders operate should not be ignored. Even an ethical person with ethical intentions can behave unethically due to behavioural dimensions and or systemic pressures. These issues are explored in depth in Modules 6, 7 and 8. Moreover, ethical leadership may vary in different cultures, including in terms of style and values as well as the manners in which the leader influences followers. Page | 7

References

Ciulla, Joanne B. (2014). Ethics, the Heart of Leadership. 3 rd ed. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger. Daft, Richard L. (2008). The Leadership Experience. 4 th ed. Stamford, CT: Cengage. de Hoogh, Annebel H.D., and Deanne N. den Hartog (2009). Ethical leadership: the positive and responsible use of power. In Power and Interdependence in Organizations, Dean Tjosvold and Barbara Wisse, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenbeiss, Silke Astrid (2012). Re-thinking ethical leadership: an interdisciplinary integrative approach. The Leadership Quarterly, vol. 23, No. 5, pp. 791-808. Fleishman, Edwin A. and others (1991). Taxonomic efforts in the description of leader behavior: a synthesis and functional interpretation. The Leadership Quarterly, vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 245- 287. French, John R. P., Jr. and Bertram Raven (1959). The bases of social power. In Studies in social power, ed. Dorwin Cartwright. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research. Hodges, Christopher and Ruth Steinholtz (2018). Ethical Business Practice and Regulation: A Behavioural and Values-Based Approach to Compliance and Enforcement. Oxford: Hart Publishing. Ng, Thomas W. H., and Daniel C. Feldman (2015). Ethical leadership: meta-analytic evidence of criterion-related and incremental validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 100, No. 3, pp. 948-965. Northouse, Peter G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice. 7th ed. Los Angeles: SAGE. Schindler, Paul L., and Cher C. Thomas (1993). The structure of interpersonal trust in the workplace. Psychological Reports, vol. 73, No. 2, pp. 563-573. Treviño, Linda Klebe, Laura Pincus Hartman and Michael E. Brown (2000). Moral person and moral manager: how executives develop a reputation for ethical leadership. California Management Review, vol. 42, No. 4, pp. 128-142. Velasquez, Manuel G. (1992). Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases. 3 rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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