BUSI 570 Week 1 Group DB Forum 1 Thread Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 1: Defining Ethical Leadership

BUSI 570 Ethical Leadership, Group Discussion Board Forum 1: Thread

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The forum prompt and the examples in the thread are composites standing in for the course's own prompt; the textbooks, research and Scripture cited are real, and the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 570.

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A good person is not automatically an ethical leader, and the difference matters most for people who have just been promoted into their first management role. Hess and Cameron (2006) argue that values become real in an organization only when leaders embody them in decisions and practices that others can see, and the research on ethical leadership explains why personal integrity alone falls short.

From conversations with senior executives and corporate ethics officers, Treviño et al. (2000) found that a leader's ethical reputation is built from two different materials. One is personal character: whether the leader tells the truth, treats people fairly and shows concern for them. The other is what they called moral management: making ethics a visible part of leadership by talking about values, modeling them deliberately and using rewards and discipline to hold others accountable. A leader who is privately upright but silent about ethics leaves followers to guess what the organization expects, and in that vacuum the pressure to hit numbers usually wins.

Brown et al. (2005) turned this idea into a measurable construct, treating ethical leadership as a combination of the leader's own proper conduct and the leader's active effort to encourage the same conduct in the people who report to them, through conversation, reward and the choices the leader makes. Followers who rated their supervisors as more ethical reported more satisfaction and effort and greater willingness to report problems to management. That last finding is the one I find most important for practice. Problems that employees hide from leaders tend to grow, and a leader whose people will bring bad news early has an organization that can correct itself. Mayer et al. (2009) then showed that ethical leadership flows down: when top managers led ethically, supervisors did too, and work groups under those supervisors showed less deviant behavior and more helping behavior.

Ethical leadership is something followers experience, not something a leader merely possesses. Jesus taught that trustworthiness in small matters reveals trustworthiness in large ones (Luke 16:10), and for a new manager the practice might be as small as explaining the reason behind a hard decision, so that the team sees the values at work. Explaining a decision costs a few minutes, but over a year those explanations teach a team what its leader actually values more clearly than any posted list of principles. The research suggests that this kind of visible, everyday consistency, more than any single dramatic stand, is what builds a reputation for ethical leadership and what followers eventually imitate.

References

Brown, M. E., Treviño, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.002

Hess, E. D., & Cameron, K. S. (Eds.). (2006). Leading with values: Positivity, virtue, and high performance. Cambridge University Press.

Mayer, D. M., Kuenzi, M., Greenbaum, R., Bardes, M., & Salvador, R. (2009). How low does ethical leadership flow? Test of a trickle-down model. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 108(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2008.04.002

Treviño, L. K., Hartman, L. P., & Brown, M. (2000). Moral person and moral manager: How executives develop a reputation for ethical leadership. California Management Review, 42(4), 128-142. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166057