Ethical Leadership Essay

Understanding leadership and ethics must originate from understanding the leaders view on flexibility in moral dilemmas when they conducts their leadership within a working environment, their moral values which acts as the foundation of embraced ethical values and influences from the corporate culture upon these leaders. From the comparison of the case of Enron scandal and World news corporation scandal against Telstra Limited, we can evaluate that a weak or ethically neutral leader will be tempted and in most cases attempt unethical situational leadership when being faced a moral dilemma, especially when facing a potential of losing profiting objectives. A leader who is not a moral person cannot possibly be embracing ethical leadership, and when they do attempt to enforce such values into their company culture, they will be seen as a ‘hypocritical leader’ who ‘fails to practice what they preach’

The definition leadership can and is only about the leader, despite this however leadership is often impacted by the ethical values and the corporate culture of that organisation and their own set of ethical codex. When different moral conflict occurs within an organisation, leader may choose to be flexible or be hard wired in practice of their ethical values to resolve these issues. The choice of being hard wired to a set of ethical values is deemed by many managers to be the safest option in dealing with moral and ethical issue when they arise and is proven with some companies such as Ford in 1996 .However the risk of being hard wired is far greater in the long run as a leader who only display and practices one set of their own socially responsible agenda, often out-dated against modern social values, and hard wired in their leadership often will not allow their ethical workplace culture to fit quickly enough into society’s expectations. To avoid such issue, a concept of “situational leadership”(1) is used. This concept revolves around being flexible and adaptive...