Philosophy of Leadership Ethics

Philosophy of Leadership Ethics

Six weeks have passed by and witnessed my changes in thinking about leadership ethics. Based on what I have learned and reflection of this course, this paper will answer what ethics means, why ethics plays a significant role in leadership, what proper leadership ethics means for me, and how to develop proper leadership ethics in a certain firm. At the end of the essay, I will talk about how my philosophy of leadership ethics relates to our course.

Ethics

When it comes to ethics, the history may date back to more than 1,700 years ago when Plat (427-347 B.C.) and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) firstly developed the ethical theory. Translated from Greek word ethos, ethics means customs, conduct, or character (Northouse, 2013). According to Stanwick and Stanwick' book (2009), "ethics can be defined as the values an individual uses to interpret whether any particular action or behavior is considered acceptable and appropriate" (p. 2). In sum, ethics tells us what is the right thing we should do.

Ethics plays an important role in leadership. Firstly, it is the nature of the leadership's working style. "Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal" (Northouse, 2013, p.5). So it is important for leaders to get sensitive to whether to direct their subordinates to do the right thing. Secondly, respect for people usually comes before engaging followers in reaching the same goal. It requires equal concentrations on personal interests, needs, and conscientious concerns. Finally, leaders could influence the group values to a large extent, with their own principles or values. Consequently, to be a proper leader cannot ignore ethics.

Ethical Leadership

Actually, people with different values may understand the ethical leadership in dissimilar ways. As for me, to be a proper ethical leader, there are five fundamental principles needed paying attention: respecting others, serving others, showing justice, manifesting honesty and building community (Northouse, 2013, p.430).

Respecting others

The same as communication, respect for others often comes at the first place and is premise of following process. Without respect, employees would think that leaders just utilize them as a tool to make profits. Specifically, respect for others is a complex term, including patient and close listening to followers, thinking in their role, and keeping open and tolerant of opposite thoughts. Treated as above, subordinates could receive information that their beliefs, principles and dreams are confirmed. Then they would get competent and enthusiastic about their jobs. In conclusion, to respect others is to express, "I care you!"

Serving others

The thought that ethical leader should serve others generated when I was doing my final project for the Course 6100 Leadership. My topic is about servant leadership. As an ethical servant leader, he must put stakeholders foremost, provide with information and skills as support, and make positively social impacts.

JetBlue has been doing well in this aspect. They appealed to employees to donate any as they wish to set up a charity, called JetBlue Crewmember Catastrophic Plan charity. The goal of this charity is to provide support to those staff that is not under insurance. This action wins employee loyalty and guarantees the success of the whole firm.

Showing justice

There is an old saying in China, "people may get intolerant of unfairness rather than poverty." People are born equal. No one should be specially considered and treated. Once unfair treatments happen, dissatisfaction and conflicts may follow. In order to emerge an equal climate, the leader should distribute an equal share or opportunity based on personal demand, effort and contribution.

Manifesting honesty

To clearly understand how important honesty is, we can figure out what negative impact dishonesty has.

Let's take HealthSouth case in week 3 as an example. When Scrushy was discovered defrauding in financial reports, their stockholders started to think HealthSouth undependable and unreliable, causing the straight influence - the decrease of stock price. What's worse, their dishonesty in business even broke the law. Scrushy, his CFOs and other stakeholders had to face a law suit, receive penalty and even be put into prison.

Building community

Let's go bake to the definition of leadership. The destination of leadership is to achieve a common goal. To reach a consensus about goal, not only leaders' purposes but also followers' targets need to be taken into account. What's more, referring to Burns' transformational leadership, the goals could transmit and ex-affect between both sides. Besides internal combination of values, ethical leaders also need take civic virtue into considerations. The HealthSouth case is the opposite example.

Building of Leadership Ethics

Demonstration of priority of ethics

In order to create an ethical environment and culture, the primary thing that leaders have to do is make staff clearly know that ethics have something close to them. Leaders are probably not to be quite appreciated the way of their daily activities to communicate their priorities to staff. If leaders do not say something or act to show that they care about ethics, staff may think that "ethics isn't valued much around here."

1. Talking about ethics

If we suggest leaders to "talk about ethics," what do we mean actually? As a matter of fact, for different people, "ethics" can have different meanings or refer to different things.

To avoid making these misconceptions still exist, leaders have to use the word "ethics" carefully, which is quite important. For instance, leaders should not say "ethics" to show the meaning of "compliance", or their real meaning that they do not agree with others in the light of their personal values. Other than that, it is also important that leaders should not say something that show that they have no concern about ethics, such as the words, "What are the chances that anyone will find out?" or "All that really matters is the bottom line."

However, avoiding those statements does not mean undercutting ethics which isn't enough. Leaders have to often directly express their support for ethical practices,