Introduction
Ethical leadership is all about the ability of an individual in any leadership position to demonstrate normatively appropriate conduct, particularly through interpersonal relationships and, most importantly, personal actions. Besides, it also involves promoting this conduct to team members through reinforcement, effective two-way communication, and decision making. On the other hand, ethical governance focuses on different values and ethically accepted behaviors, culture, process, procedures, ways of getting things done, and being able to achieve a high standard of performance, efficiency, satisfaction, and quality. This literature review will focus on the role and impacts of ethical leadership and governance, particularly influencing different values, decision-making processes, and, most importantly, trust.
Review of the Literature
Generally, ethics is mainly a branch of philosophy focused on dealing with different moral aspects related to human behaviors. Ethical leadership and governance, in modern societies, involves the application of different and fundamental ethical principles to different situations of leadership and governance. Ethics, in this case, focuses on one major question; “what is it that a leader must do?” as a result, ethical leadership and governance have no interests in common practices, in what leaders usually do, and what could be done[1]. As a result, ethical leadership and governance ensure effectiveness in the ability of leaders to decide what is good and bad in consideration of their leadership roles and responsibilities[2].
Ethical leaders depend mainly on ethical leadership styles. This style mainly focuses on maintaining ethical standards that ensure effectiveness and positive outcomes on maintaining ethical beliefs and values of the rights and dignity of involved people. As a result, ethical leadership plays a critical role in creating codes of conduct for a group of people or an organization. These codes of conduct are essential in shaping different actions and processes within an organization. Besides, ethical leadership is important in shaping the behaviors of leaders and their team members within any workplace and ensuring positive outcomes in the ways customers are dealt with in general[3]. Logically, ethical leadership’s primary goal is to convey consistent and principled ideas or messages to team members, which ensure ethical considerations and approaches in making different decisions and perfuming different roles and responsibilities.
Ethical corporate governance focuses on how an organization should be managed and operated and, most importantly, specific principles by which the organization should be managed. In most cases, the ethical governance of an organization is conducted with the primary aim of ensuring the benefits of involved stakeholders. As a result, ethical governance is critical, particularly in balancing individual and societal goals and economic and social goals[4]. Technically, ethical governance influences the level of transparency and trust. Trust and transparency are important in achieving a specific balance and development of an organization, its leaders, and most importantly, involved team members. Ethical governance is therefore essential in safeguarding the interests of all stakeholders[5]. Besides, ethical corporate governance plays a crucial role in ensuring fair allocation of jobs among all team members. Logically, this is important as it ensures effectiveness and positive outcomes in creating a healthy working relationship within any workplace.
Most ethical leaders have one major characteristic in common: being conscious in making decisions. Technically, conscious means one is mindful and awake. As a result, living consciously means a leader is open to perceiving their surroundings[6]. As a result, it becomes easy to understand and approach different circumstances and consider the best possible ways to respond to these circumstances to respect and honor different goals, needs, and values. Conciseness, in this case, ensure leaders are successful in facing different circumstances and pursuing their desired goals and objectives in alignment with specific values. When consciousness is lost, people are most likely to be swept away by their habits and instincts, which in most cases are less likely to have any positive impact. In such circumstances, leaders are more likely to focus on pursuing goals that are not conducive to their happiness or health. In such cases, the outcome is to act in ways that will result in regret. Besides, it also leads to more likely results to affect and hurt other people and an organization. As a result, ethical leadership and governance ensure effectiveness and positive outcomes in the general performance and success of team members and the organization.
A leader has an important role in inspiring subordinates to behave ethically from a collective perspective. Ethical leaders focus on setting good examples and giving directions for ethical behaviors. As a result, team members can observe and act in the same manner. As a result, ethical leadership and governance ensure positive impacts on other people, particularly by presenting them with a set of desired actions and behaviors that should be adopted for the greater good[7].
On the personal level, ethical leadership and governance are of significant essence for reputations and, most importantly, credibility. As a result, if one needs to become an effective leader, it is important to consider the leadership process as a long game. Unethical leadership and governance can affect and ruin a leader’s reputation, self-esteem, and other people, thus contributing to a suboptimal outcome and missing a chance to ensure effectiveness in expressing an individual’s full potential.
Besides, ethical leadership and governance allow leaders to know and understand their internal compass and value. The main reason is that knowing oneself is one of the most important traits related to an ethical leader. As a result, knowing these value and principles allow effectiveness and positive outcomes in the ability of leaders to make themselves visible to other people, take specific positions, and most importantly, enter into negotiation solidly[8]. It also ensures leaders have consistent ethical behaviors and are less tolerant of deviation from ethical codes. Logically, reputations are built on repetition. Most ethical leaders know this[9]. Typically, leaders tend to be vulnerable in different ways. The main reason is that people’s trust in them can fade up easily, particularly if they misbehave, no matter how better they were in the past. As a result, ethical leadership and governance ensure leaders are consistent in sending signals that allow people to maintain their trust in them[10].
In most cases, acting against the code of conduct and the leader failing to take action may send a signal that these codes are not important. As a result, ethical leadership and governance ensure leaders do not expect such important areas of concern. This case means that leaders can immediately signal some behaviors that will not be tolerated in any way. In doing so, leaders are able to build credibility and consistency while reducing possibilities of doubts and confusion in consideration of accepted behaviors[11]. Ethical governance helps in coming up with creative and productive solutions, particularly those that will be adopted and accepted by the majority of people within an organization. Technically, decisions within any organization are no longer flat, convectional, or taken behind closed doors. This case means that different people can make decisions better by listening to stakeholders, particularly through an ethical process, and most importantly, by analyzing substance and not necessarily the form of an event, an issue, or a situation.
Conclusion
Ethical leadership and governance play a major role in influencing the performance of leaders, their roles, and most importantly, their influences on other people. Ethical focuses on setting a specific set of codes of conduct that manage, control, and influence positive behaviors and actions of a specific team. Over the years, ethics has become a major focus of consideration in most organizations and leaderships processes. Ethics in leadership and governance has therefore been considered, and important are reliable factors that help to improve the performance of leaders and their influence on organizational performance and success. Effective, ethical consideration helps to ensure leaders understand the best strategies, actions, behaviors, and values that will help to influence how they make decisions related to other people and influence others towards achieving desired goals and objectives. As a result, ethics, leadership, and governance go hand-in-hand. While some leaders tend to think there is a choice between being successful and profitable or leading in an ethical way that is simply not the case. Ethical leadership and governance are important drivers for success and should be considered in any leadership process and governance of an organization or a team.
References
Afsar, Bilal, and Asad Shahjehan. “Linking ethical leadership and moral voice: The effects of moral efficacy, trust in leader, and leader-follower value congruence.” Leadership & Organization Development Journal (2018).
Agbim, Kenneth Chukwujioke. “Effect of ethical leadership on corporate governance, performance and social responsibility: A study of selected deposit money banks in Benue state, Nigeria.” International Journal of Community Development and Management Studies 2 (2018): 019-035.
Astrachan, Joseph H., Claudia Binz Astrachan, Giovanna Campopiano, and Massimo Baù. “Values, spirituality and religion: Family business and the roots of sustainable ethical behavior.” Journal of Business Ethics 163, no. 4 (2020): 637-645.
Brown, Michael E., and Linda K. Treviño. “Ethical leadership: A review and future directions.” The leadership quarterly 17, no. 6 (2006): 595-616.
Hegarty, Niall, and Salvatore Moccia. “Components of ethical leadership and their importance in sustaining organizations over the long term.” The Journal of Values-Based Leadership 11, no. 1 (2018): 7.
Le, Phong Ba, and Hui Lei. “Fostering knowledge sharing behaviours through ethical leadership practice: the mediating roles of disclosure-based trust and reliance-based trust in leadership.” Knowledge Management Research & Practice 16, no. 2 (2018): 183-195.
Müller, Ralf, Erling S. Andersen, Øvind Kvalnes, Jingting Shao, Shankar Sankaran, J. Rodney Turner, Christopher Biesenthal, Derek Walker, and Siegfried Gudergan. “The interrelationship of governance, trust, and ethics in temporary organizations.” Project Management Journal 44, no. 4 (2013): 26-44.
Pasricha, Palvi, Bindu Singh, and Pratibha Verma. “Ethical leadership, organic organizational cultures and corporate social responsibility: An empirical study in social enterprises.” Journal of Business Ethics 151, no. 4 (2018): 941-958.
Sarwar, Huma, Muhammad Ishtiaq Ishaq, Anam Amin, and Roheel Ahmed. “Ethical leadership, work engagement, employees’ well-being, and performance: a cross-cultural comparison.” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 28, no. 12 (2020): 2008-2026.
Shareef, Raad Abdulkareem, and Tarik Atan. “The influence of ethical leadership on academic employees’ organizational citizenship behavior and turnover intention: Mediating role of intrinsic motivation.” Management Decision (2018).
Tourigny, Louise, Jian Han, Vishwanath V. Baba, and Polly Pan. “Ethical leadership and corporate social responsibility in China: A multilevel study of their effects on trust and organizational citizenship behavior.” Journal of Business Ethics 158, no. 2 (2019): 427-440.
[1] Brown, Michael E., and Linda K. Treviño. “Ethical leadership: A review and future directions.” The leadership quarterly 17, no. 6 (2006): 595-616.
[2] Shareef, Raad Abdulkareem, and Tarik Atan. “The influence of ethical leadership on academic employees’ organizational citizenship behavior and turnover intention: Mediating role of intrinsic motivation.” Management Decision (2018).
[3] Afsar, Bilal, and Asad Shahjehan. “Linking ethical leadership and moral voice: The effects of moral efficacy, trust in leader, and leader-follower value congruence.” Leadership & Organization Development Journal (2018).
[4] Hegarty, Niall, and Salvatore Moccia. “Components of ethical leadership and their importance in sustaining organizations over the long term.” The Journal of Values-Based Leadership 11, no. 1 (2018): 7.
[5] Sarwar, Huma, Muhammad Ishtiaq Ishaq, Anam Amin, and Roheel Ahmed. “Ethical leadership, work engagement, employees’ well-being, and performance: a cross-cultural comparison.” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 28, no. 12 (2020): 2008-2026.
[6] Tourigny, Louise, Jian Han, Vishwanath V. Baba, and Polly Pan. “Ethical leadership and corporate social responsibility in China: A multilevel study of their effects on trust and organizational citizenship behavior.” Journal of Business Ethics 158, no. 2 (2019): 427-440.
[7] Pasricha, Palvi, Bindu Singh, and Pratibha Verma. “Ethical leadership, organic organizational cultures and corporate social responsibility: An empirical study in social enterprises.” Journal of Business Ethics 151, no. 4 (2018): 941-958.
[8] Astrachan, Joseph H., Claudia Binz Astrachan, Giovanna Campopiano, and Massimo Baù. “Values, spirituality and religion: Family business and the roots of sustainable ethical behavior.” Journal of Business Ethics 163, no. 4 (2020): 637-645.
[9] Agbim, Kenneth Chukwujioke. “Effect of ethical leadership on corporate governance, performance and social responsibility: A study of selected deposit money banks in Benue state, Nigeria.” International Journal of Community Development and Management Studies 2 (2018): 019-035.
[10] Le, Phong Ba, and Hui Lei. “Fostering knowledge sharing behaviours through ethical leadership practice: the mediating roles of disclosure-based trust and reliance-based trust in leadership.” Knowledge Management Research & Practice 16, no. 2 (2018): 183-195.
[11] Müller, Ralf, Erling S. Andersen, Øvind Kvalnes, Jingting Shao, Shankar Sankaran, J. Rodney Turner, Christopher Biesenthal, Derek Walker, and Siegfried Gudergan. “The interrelationship of governance, trust, and ethics in temporary organizations.” Project Management Journal 44, no. 4 (2013): 26-44.
Leave a Reply