Ethical Leadership Paper

Words: 590
Pages: 3

Encourage, measure, and reward ethical leadership at multiple levels. Ethical leadership from the top is very important (because it creates an environment in which lower-level ethical leaders can flourish), but ethical leadership at the supervisory level has a huge impact on followers’ attitudes and behavior. Organizations may want to channel resources toward developing ethical leadership in their supervisory-level leaders.
Ethical leadership reduces divergent behavior in followers (Mayer et al., 2009;Mayer et al., 2012). When unethical acts do occur in the social environment, workers who have an ethical leader are more probable to report the unethical act to management because ethical leaders create a psychologically safe environment and
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Henchman who rate their leader as more ethical have more favorable job attitudes such as job satisfaction and commitment. They are also less likely to report resolution to leave the institution. This is because henchman are attracted to ethical role models who treat them fairly, care about them and set high ethical standards. This clearly displays that the main rationale behind filing a law suit against the company was showing dissatisfaction towards the company.
Ethical leadership is also associated with more friendly and co-operative behavior from employees, perhaps because ethical leaders model co-operative behavior (Mayer et al., 2009;Walumbwa & Schaubroeck, 2009).
Research is beginning to investigate the processes that contribute to understanding how ethical leadership affects outcomes. The most important process appears to be modeling (from social learning theory) (Bandura, 1986). If an ethical leader models ethical decisions and behaviors, followers can be expected to do the same.
A study in Harvard, in addition reveals that ethical behaviors hit the company’s profit and other sales figures as well. Researchers found that CEOs whose employees gave them high marks for character had an average return on assets of 9.35% over a two-year period. That’s nearly five times as much as what those with low character ratings had; their ROA averaged only 1.93%. More in Kiel, Return on Character,