Is ethical leadership a no-win situation? Is it possible to remain ethical in all aspects? We review theories from Heifetz, Burns, and Greenleaf and apply Biblical teaching and verses and through in a few moral dilemmas just for fun.

Ethical Leadership Continued

It seems like we live in a world of one after another high-profile scandal in business and government. Because of this, the interest in ethical leadership has grown proportionally. Prominent ethical scholars, including Ronald Heifetz, James MacGregor Burns, and Robert Greenleaf, have provided perspective on this area. A common theme is the need for leadership based on honesty, service to others, and moral courage. For Heifetz, leadership involves using authority to help followers uphold values in the workplace. Burns's theory of transformational leadership emphasizes the moral development of followers and maintaining high standards of ethical conduct. Greenleaf's approach to leadership has strong ethical overtones, with the central premise being that true leadership is service to others.

Heifetz's theory of leadership is known as adaptive leadership, and it states that it is the responsibility of the leader to assist the follower in struggling with change and personal growth

Burn's theory of leadership is known as the transformational leader. Burns states it is the leader's responsibility to assist followers in assessing their values & needs and to help followers rise to a higher level of functioning.

Robert Greenleaf developed the idea of the Servant Leader, and he states the leader should be attentive to the concerns of their followers and should take care of them and nurture them. In addition, Greenleaf argues that the servant leader has a social responsibility to be concerned with the have-nots and should strive to remove inequalities and social injustices. Greenleaf places a great deal of emphasis on listening, empathy, and unconditional acceptance of others.

In his 1986 book, The Hard Problems of Management: Gaining the Ethics Edge, Mark Pastin was the first to take a managerial approach to ethics in business. This was considered very thought-provoking on the ethics of management, and Pastin makes the following point: "An ideal [ethical] organization adds to the value of the individuals who are the organization. It does not require that individuals sacrifice some of their integrity to belong to the organization". I want to paraphrase that statement in terms of leadership. Leadership, correctly understood, operates this way: "Leadership adds to the value of the individuals who are in the relationship. Leadership does not require that individuals sacrifice some of their integrity to be in the relationship."

Pastin viewed leadership as a sort of social contract, and he developed a two-pronged test for deciding the ethics of a contract that could be translated to the concept of leadership. "Social contract is sound if the parties to the contract would enter the contract freely and fairly" Pastin does not tell us what his use of the word "freely" means except to equate it with voluntarily. Pastin also does not go into how he defines the word "fairly," but there is a secret to determining if every contract is fair.

"A contract is fair if the parties would freely agree to the contract even if their roles were reversed."

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy
Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp