An Essay Paper on Ethical Leadership

Ethical Leadership 

Leadership is the ability to guide people towards a foreseeable goal or towards achieving an objective. Ethical from the word ethic translates to values, ways, or norms that are accepted by society as clean and healthy. Thus, the blend of ethical leadership translates to the ability to guide people towards a foreseeable goal through means or ways that are perceived as healthy and acceptable by society. 

Ethical leadership holds integrity as the core value, it influences the leaders to take responsibility and claim accountability in the corporate culture. In its organizational structure the key implementors who happen to be the board members, human resource managers and chief officers comply and conform to ethics and the corporates culture (Yukl et al, 2013). This translates into empowering employees as well as helping the corporate understand the importance of employing ethical leadership principles in ethical issues and day-to-day activities while combating the business dynamics.

Leadership revolves around making decisions that consecutively happen to affect many people, this makes the aspect of decision-making very crucial in leadership calling for ethical decision-making. The leadership skills of a person are derived from the way the persons approach problems. A leader can be confined to be in any of the following categories; ethical, unethical, egocentric, apathetic, and psychopathic. Putting our focus on an ethical leader, he/she incorporates ethical leadership principles by establishing an ethical culture. An ethical leader can motivate viewpoints as well as take the responsibilities to induce ethical conduct for employees in a corporate and also influences corporate culture and promotes ethical posture.

Organizations practice different types of leadership styles since they are managed by a leader who is either ethical, apathetic, unethical, or psychopathic leader. A leader who practices ethical leadership style behaves in accordance with a set of principles and values that are accepted by the majority as a sound basis for the common good (Yukl et al., 2013). These leaders display transparency, integrity, trust, respect and honesty attributes in their leadership roles. On the other hand, unethical leaders display falsifying of information, promotion of their self-serving vision, and dictatorial behaviour. An apathetic leader, however, is a leader who is inattentive to what is going on among his/her team. They usually fail to decide. Psychopathic leaders are leaders who possess’ charisma, persuasiveness and creativity. Due to this, they are regarded as the most successful leaders as a result of these attributes. 

Ethical leadership when employed in corporate management results in many benefits that are not just confined to the business but also to the public (Den Hartog, 2015). One of the advantages that come with ethical leadership includes employee satisfaction, ethical leadership creates an environment in which the employees feel valued and their welfare taken into consideration this, in turn, boosts their morale and consequently increases their output. Another advantage is that it leads to many competitive advantages, this can be attributed to the fact that ethical leadership upholds integrity thus making a corporate involve itself with h healthy competition with other corporates in the market, this makes the corporate win the trust of its prospective customers in the general public as well as increase its trust with external stakeholders other advantages include duction in gov government-imposed, induction of positive attributes on the corporate’s culture, as well as positive market firm evaluation. 

At a glance, it is clear that the adoption of ethical leadership in a corporate’s management results in many benefits that not only create a conducive environment for businesses to thrive but also create an environment that ensures the general public is protected and the welfare of employees taken into account enabling a healthy business environment. It can be deduced that ethical leadership is vital and effective in coping up with the business dynamics as business trends evolve from time to time.   

Reference 

Den Hartog, D. N. (2015). Ethical leadership. Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav., 2(1), 409-434. 

Yukl, G., Mahsud, R., Hassan, S., & Prussia, G. E. (2013). An improved measure of ethical leadership. Journal of leadership & organizational studies, 20(1), 38-48.