The Ethical Leader showcases the necessity and practicality of using an ethics-based business model for competitive advantage and long-term organizational success. Ethical behaviour by businesses, or their staff, is often seen as the corporate and social responsibility icing on an organizational cake – something that is nice to do but never really essential. But by turning this view around – and making ethical behaviour a primary focus – Witzel shows how businesses can create and maintain long-term competitive advantage. Trust and respect among key stakeholder groups, particularly employees and customers, cannot be overstated in their importance to an organization's success: trust engenders loyalty and good reputation, which in turn builds brand value. However, while ethical behaviour is key to trust-building, in order for an organization to see lasting, positive outcomes it needs to go deeper than something managers do out of a sense of moral duty. The Ethical Leader shows why ethical practice has to be the platform on which a strong and enduring business can be built, and leaders and managers need to provide the necessary tools and insights to enable this to happen. Witzel offers a practical introduction to some of the key concepts in ethics, including how to deal with ethical paradoxes and making ethical decisions. The book explores the specifics of what makes an ethical leader, and how leaders can communicate values and standards across an organization in order to engage the trust of employees, consumers, shareholders and the wider community.

Are leaders morally special? Is there something ethically distinctive about the relationship between leaders and followers? Should leaders do whatever it takes to achieve group goals? Leadership Ethics uses moral theory, as well as empirical research in psychology, to evaluate the reasons everyday leaders give to justify breaking the rules. Written for people without a background in philosophy, it introduces readers to the moral theories that are relevant to leadership ethics: relativism, amoralism, egoism, virtue ethics, social contract theory, situation ethics, communitarianism, and cosmopolitan theories such as utilitarianism and transformational leadership. Unlike many introductory texts, the book does more than simply acquaint readers with different approaches to leadership ethics. It defends the Kantian view that everyday leaders are not justified in breaking the moral rules.

Ethical leadership does not simply emerge from a code of conduct, a good school, or a host of good intentions. It is an individual choice, or rather a series of choices that emerges from the complex interaction of personal values with social imperatives. This book explores how and why some people become ethical leaders in morally challenging and complex social environments. In Ethical Leadership, Aidan McQuade provides insight into the concept of human agency – the individual’s choice of a course of action in response to the options posed by that individual’s engagement with the social world. He puts forth a new model of human agency – the "cruciform of agency" – which recognises that the potential range of individual action emerges from the nature of the resonance that social options strike with personal thoughts. Every action adds to the individual’s personal biography in ways that influence subsequent choices by confirming or changing personal values and hopes, hence influencing the way the individual subsequently thinks about the world. In explaining the potential and limits of human agency for ethical leadership, the book establishes a basis for executives, policy makers and academics to conceptualise and develop more robust and realistic approaches for the mitigation of some of the most pressing moral issues facing humanity today. These include the inter-related challenges of modern slavery and global warming, which pose such critical threats to the Earth itself. In this book McQuade not only sets an agenda for action but empowers individual leaders to find the moral courage to better advance human rights and preserve the environment even when such action requires unpopular choices.

Ethics is at the heart of leadership. All leaders assume ethical burdens and must make every effort to make informed ethical decisions and foster ethical behavior among followers. The Sixth Edition of Meeting the Ethical Challenges of Leadership: Casting Light or Shadow explores the ethical demands of leadership and the dark side of leadership. Author Craig E. Johnson takes a multidisciplinary approach to leadership ethics, drawing from many fields of research to help readers make moral decisions, lead in a moral manner, and create an ethical culture. Packed with real-world case studies, examples, self-assessments, and applications, this fully-updated new edition is designed to increase students’ ethical competence and leadership abilities.

This invaluable resource explores situations that principals are likely to encounter and presents questions and issues to help them confront difficult ethical dilemmas.

The world cries out for ethical leaders. We expect the best, but we are often left profoundly disappointed. While leadership programs may feature ethics as part of their training, the approach is often either simplistic or overly esoteric. This book addresses this scarcity of resources for training ethical leaders, providing a primer of several ethical frameworks accompanied by extended examples to help inform decision-making. The text also addresses several leadership models that claim an ethical component. By providing a consistent case analysis based on the Five Components of Leadership Model, readers benefit from a comprehensive approach to understanding ethical leadership.

The fourth edition of the best-selling text, Ethical Leadership and Decision Making in Education, continues to address the increasing interest in ethics and assists educational leaders with the complex dilemmas in today’s challenging and diverse society. Through discussion and analysis of real-life moral dilemmas that educational leaders face in their schools and communities, authors Shapiro and Stefkovich demonstrate the application of the four ethical paradigms—the ethics of justice, care, critique, and profession. After an illustration of how the Multiple Ethical Paradigm approach may be applied to real dilemmas, the authors present a series of cases written by students and academics in the field representing the dilemmas faced by practicing educational leaders in urban, suburban, and rural settings in an era full of complications and contradictions. Following each case are questions that call for thoughtful, complex thinking and help readers come to grips with their own ethical codes and apply them to practical situations. New in the Fourth Edition: A new chapter on technology versus respect, focusing on ethical issues such as cyber-bullying and sexting. New cases on teachers with guns, the military and education, children of undocumented immigrants, homeless students, videos in bathrooms, incentive pay, first responders, private alternative high schools, verbal threats, and gaming etiquette. Updates throughout to reflect contemporary issues and recent scholarship in the field of ethical leadership. This edition adds teaching notes for the instructor that stress the importance of self-reflection, use of new technologies, and global appeal of ethical paradigms and dilemmas. Easily adaptable to a variety of uses, this book is a critical resource for a wide range of audiences, including both aspiring and practicing administrators, teacher leaders, and educational policy makers.