Ethics, Contemporary

Past Perspectives on Leadership and Ethics

In modern times, writings focusing specifically on the ethical nature of management begin most notably with the classic 1938 text, The Functions of the Executive, by the businessman Chester Barnard (1886–1961). Barnard advocated adherence to personal moral standards and viewed the creation of moral codes for others as an executive's greatest responsibility. By creating a moral code, the executive ensures that the influence of organizational norms will help guide employees who must make decisions within ethical gray areas.

In a similar vein, the business writer William Whyte Jr. (1917–1999) argued in the 1950s that the predominating social ethic in U.S. culture takes the burden of moral judgment and responsibility off the shoulders of the individual and places it on the organization (a social body, it should be noted, more than willing to assume such a role because of the advantages it provides). In acquiescing, the individual puts his or her faith in the organization as moral navigator and becomes susceptible to its influence, ethical or unethical.

Clearly, the moral success of either Barnard's or Whyte's vision ultimately rests on organizational leaders as ethical guides and role models. But do the most moral individuals get promoted to the top of their organizations? Evidence on that score is contradictory.

The psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) conceptualized individuals as progressing [Page 460]through three levels (preconventional, conventional, and postconventional) of cognitive moral development. According to Kohlberg and his contemporaries, most adults fail to achieve postconventional moral reasoning. Rather, the majority of adults reason at a conventional level in which a viewpoint that supports the norms of the established system (be it organizational, political, or otherwise) defines the roles and rules that guide individual judgment. Consequently, an individual's sense of morality becomes heavily biased by those leaders who shape the system and who are, in turn, just as susceptible to conventional, rather than postconventional, moral reasoning.

Research on Leadership and Ethics

In the theoretical realm of ethical decision making, the widely cited frameworks incorporate a combination of individual and situational moderators. The business ethicist Linda Treviño's person-situation interactionist model specifies an individual's cognitive moral development, locus of control, immediate job context, and organizational culture, among other factors, as having moderating effects on the ethical decision-making process. Shelby Hunt and Scott Vitell's general theory of marketing ethics follows similar lines, but with a greater focus on the various environments in which the individual is embedded as well as on the individual's internal evaluations of probability and desirability of consequences and the notion of inherent rights. Finally, the issue-contingent model developed by Thomas Jones, a scholar of management and organization, expands these theories, noting that previous models failed to take into account the various characteristics of the ethical issue to be resolved. Jones proposes that the characteristics of the ethical issue, which determine its “moral intensity,” affect every stage of moral decision making and behavior.

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