Chapter 5: Ethical Leadership
Chapter Abstract
Can you lead when no one is watching? Does your ethical foundations flow into your leadership style? This section examines these traits and provides leadership style that best fits the evolution of the CJ system. The following discussion is an explanation of mixed research relative to the Leader-Member Exchange defining the leader-follower requirement of leadership. The author of this discussion compares in brief form the Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) with the Social Identity Theory of Leadership and provides a view from Adaptive Theory researchers as a comparison or more to the point their interaction with each other. The Transformational and Transactional styles are compared. The LMX style closely relates to Transformational leadership due to leader follower relationship. The transactional leader may relate to the authoritarian style more closely. The trait theory is examined in the context of this styles relationship with Transformational styles.
Leadership Defined
Ethical leadership is leadership through principles that influences followers. Leaders lead through choices developed amidst moral growth enhancing values, dignity, fairness, integrity, charisma and innovation without jeopardizing how we ought to behave. The main goal of the leader of any organization is to influence the membership to achieve goals and eventually attain the vision of the organization. Ethical Leadership means that which is morally good or considered morally right; therefore teleological leadership ethics are a leaders action with no intrinsic moral status whereas deontological leadership ethics considers leaders actions to have intrinsic moral status (Kanungo, 2001).
Inhibit Leadership Growth
Successful leaders exercise authority or power of authority in a free and pluralistic society consisting of members who choose to follow through no single code of ethics but several sets of values emanating from a variety of cultures and subcultures (Ortmeier & Meese, 2010). Leadership is about influencing and motivating and therefore as a motivator the ethical leader should seek to fit the individual member to the environment for the greater good of the organization.
Manipulation Leadership in a perfect world is motivation by bending people’s pathway so that they head toward a predetermined outcome. Leaders from time to time may find the need to bend the intended paths of others for noble reasons. Then is there such a thing as an ethical manipulator? Realistically there may events that require this measure and might be for self-serving gain as well. Either way, seeking to redirect the will of others is often referred to as directing, structuring or focusing behaviors (Zigarmi, Blanchard, O’Conner, & Edeburn, 2005).
Manipulation of others may be viewed as coercive, deceptive, or self-serving by followers while at the same time might be considered by the leader as fair, motivational, purposeful, humble and honorable. However, any lea