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Example research essay topic: Ethical Leadership In Public Sector - 2,059 words

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Ethical Leadership in Public Sector Why do some organizations compliance and market conduct efforts succeed, while others fail? Why is it that compliance is part of the culture of some organizations and not others? Why is it that some organizations are succeeding in solving their compliance problems, while others are fighting a losing battle? A careful analysis will show that the missing ingredient for success is ethical leadership. The starting point to understanding ethical leadership is values. The values of honesty, integrity, holding people responsible for their actions, fairness, etc.

are the values that you must have to be an ethical leader. But much more is needed. Ethical leadership is values in action. If you are in a position of power and responsibility in your organization, your lack of ethical leadership puts your organization-at risk. Senior executives who dont exercise ethical leadership will cause compliance problems to be ignored or will block efforts to fix them. They hamstring efforts to improve compliance and market conduct.

They wont allocate the resources needed or will stop short of taking effective action. In the long run, their lack of leadership will come back to haunt their organization. Many of these organization leaders believe that having the personal values that underlie ethical leadership is enough, but is isnt. Their unwillingness to put their values into action brands them as unethical leaders. Having missed the opportunity to set the correct tone through their actions, they have failed themselves and their companies. (2) In Plato's The Republic, he inferred that once the idea of a perfect leader has been established, the members of the class that ruled upon bureaucracy wondered how to find out a predictable way to assign the best men and women to the highest levels of government. Socrates knew how to compel the best natures among all possible candidates, but his theory demanded that the individuals chosen to be the most prudent to govern should have to go the longer way around.

With the onset of the Information Era, elimination of the organizational hierarchy is prevalent. Information technology and the Internet do not know boundaries and are not limited to the continental United States, thus boundaries for leaders are disappearing. This new era has brought about a more open organizational culture for public organizations. It has become commonplace to characterize the environment of public organizations as being similar to that of the private sector- that both face dynamic, turbulent environments.

Countries are competing internationally in the marketplace. Globalization of economies is placing an enhanced and sustained pressure on governments to improve competitiveness across the board and, as a result, public sectors everywhere are under the spotlight. Some argue that the impact of globalism on public sector organizations reinforces a belief in the necessity for smaller government and allows less possibility for local solutions based on traditional values. (4) Information technology changes the continual public administration argument about differences between managers and leaders, and the concept of leadership being inherent or developed. The impact is more obvious on culture, by opening borders and eliminating walls, anyone has a capability of acquiring information and communicating in a matter of seconds. In the same token, it brings more complexity to every aspect of our lives.

It does not leave much room for linear thinking or behaving. Thus it is very important for managers and leaders, which we put in the same category to use certain accepted ethical standards in their actions. Nonlinear thinking teaches us that behavior arises out of the interactions among and between constituent parts over time. The accumulation precludes searching for a direct cause and effect that are closely linked by time or space. If leadership continues towards linear thinking there will be increasing difficulty in adapting to the increasing turbulence and complexity of the times. Information technology and changes imposed by it, can assist leadership in competing innovative, and consequently successfully in todays rapidly changing environment.

Margaret J. Wheatley, in her book Leadership and the New Science, argued once that stability, consistency and cohesion as the prerequisites of business success must be abandoned for the uncharted waters of accepting power in organizations being generated by relationships. Perhaps it is time for leaders to focusing on relationships and processes to diminish the need to control, micro-manage or manipulate. Further leadership theories will be needed to reflect social views of how things are accomplished in daily lives and in organizations. New millennium leaders will need to adapt the role of facilitator for organizations to overcome the resistance to change, which may be a greater barrier than technology. (6) Paradoxically, in this era of continuing organizational change and restructuring, it may not be possible to relinquish the theory that outcomes can be predicted and controlled. Nonlinear mathematical models may well advance in sophistication so that outcomes can be predicted and controlled.

However, for the current stage of the co-evolution process, scholars need to continue developing management applications that forge a language for the new sciences, construct new mental models for understanding organizational complexity, and reshape management strategies to embody co-determined behavior. When top management makes special deals with big producers or ignores their compliance problems, it tells the whole organization that ethical behavior is not important. When executives seek to excuse the ethical lapses of top agents and managers, or they derail aggressive compliance efforts, it is clear to home office employees, that the executives are unethical leaders. Chief legal counsels who try to protect the organization from potential class action suits by avoiding a careful assessment of risks, are demonstrating their own lack of ethical leadership. Senior executives, however, arent the only ones who need to show ethical leadership. When managers actively court experienced agents who have a reputation for being replacement artists, the message is louder than any comments about high standards.

When a top agent circumvents the organizations sales material review process, it serves as an example for other agents. If you are seen as a leader because you are a top agent or field manager, your failure to exercise ethical leadership will undermine your organizations efforts. As a role model, your lack of ethical leadership will serve as a standard for your peers. No organization program can overcome that.

One of the problems with ethical leadership is that there is no middle ground. If you are in a leadership position you are either an ethical leader or an unethical one. Your actions demonstrate one of two paths for others to follow. If you signal that unethical behavior is acceptable, that sets a standard for others to follow. Ethical leadership is rare in most companies because the pressure of performance forces people to value achieving results over the way the results are achieved. The means to achieving the performance goals are not as important as the goals.

They sacrifice their values for sales, premium, new recruits, etc. Expediency takes precedent over whats ethical. You can develop ethical leadership if you are willing to first accept your responsibility to be an ethical leader. Many people arent willing to do that, because they dont want to risk failing. They believe that they will be at a disadvantage since the people who cheat, cut corners and act unethically will get results while they will not. Thats why, if leadership takes courage, ethical leadership takes heroism.

An ethical leader may be at a disadvantage because his / her standards are higher. Thats why ethical leadership is rare. In this book Managing Corporate Ethics Aguilar explains how managers can create ethical programs within their organizations that not only discourage large-scale wrongdoing but also can contribute significantly to corporate excellence. On the basis of his in-depth research on 10 prominent companies with proven successful ethics programs, the author recommends a four-step approach to building ethics into the corporation: encourage open discussion of ethical matters; ensure that the business is well-man-aged in other ways; set up an ethics program that considers the interests of people affected by the companys operations, providing safeguards against corrupting business pressures; and obtain ethical people as employees, professional advisers and consultants. (8) Ideas, like products, organizations and people, go through a life cycle of four phases: birth, growth, maturity, death.

Ethical leadership is beginning to break through into the growth phase. We can anticipate intense activity, as consultants develop material which they hope will attract potential clients. The growth phase will be characterized by one or more acronyms, brand names, user manuals and diligent attempts to establish product differentiation. The move into the growth phase was stimulated by the first report of the Nolan committee, the Greenbury committee proposals and an increasing number of articles in business magazines such as People Management and in the quality press. Maturity in the ideas life cycle is reached when material is made routine and reproduced mechanically. This stage has already been reached with total quality management (TQM).

Organizations adopt ready-made solutions for fear of being left behind. This me-tools and defensive marketing leads inevitably to disillusionment, rejection and eventual death. (3) First, it is impossible to estimate the life expectancy of any idea with confidence. Some ideas fizzle out rapidly; others display remarkable persistence. Even in our turbulent commercial world, the average age of the UKs top 20 grocery brands is 56 years. The key to the continued success of these old brands is the fact that they never stand still but enjoy continual development and progress. So there is no inevitability about the belief that management ideas are always transient.

Second, if an idea ceases to attract substantial publicity, it does not mean it has moved beyond its sell-by date. In the case of TQM, a lower profile may mean that a quality culture has become so deeply embedded in the organization that it is taken for granted. Third, even if an idea will never be followed through to its natural conclusion, it cannot safely be ignored in its initial stages. To be left behind when some source of competitive advantage presents itself is as foolish as an uncritical adoption of every novelty that comes along.

The time for ethical leadership has come. The timing is partly a result of adverse publicity about corporate greed and commercial cynicism, and partly a product of the realization that business ethics is good business. Some organizations adopting ethical leadership are jumping on a fashionable bandwagon rather than acting from real conviction. It will take some time before the discrepancies between the high-sounding words of these bandwagon jumpers and the unchanging nature of their actions are exposed.

But once such contrasts are revealed, these organizations will claim that trying to be ethical is a waste of time, effort and resources, conveniently ignoring the fact that they were-never ethical in the first place. (5) For an organization, being ethical involves the pursuit of long-term owner value, while respecting distributive justice and what Sternberg calls ordinary decency. (2) Distributive justice requires allocating rewards in proportion to the contributions made to corporate purposes, while ordinary decency involves acting honestly and fairly while refraining from physical violence and coercion. Our emphasis on ethical leadership, however, goes beyond this context of interpersonal transactions and trust. Leadership requires those at the top of organizations to specify a clear vision, to pursue the vision consistently over time and to integrate an ethical dimension as part of the vision. In this way, ethics and leadership combine to enable judgments with ethical dimensions to be made more easily. Bibliography: 1) S. Connect and T Johns, Ethical Leadership, IPD, 1995. 2) E.

Sternberg, Just Business, Little Brown, 1994. 3) D. R. Seen, Whistle-blowers face retaliation dismissal, study shows, Ethics, Sept-Oct 1987. 4) Gatewood, Robert, George C. Thornton, III, and H. W. Hennesey, Jr. 1990.

Reliability of exercise ratings in the leaderless group discussion. Journal of Occupational Psychology 63: 331 - 42. 5) Graham, Jr. , Cole B. and Steven W. Hays. 1993.

Managing the public organization. 2 nd ed. Washington: Congressional Quarterly Inc. 6) Howard, Ann. 1993. Some troubling paradigms for the assessment of leadership. A paper presented to the 21 st International Congress on the Assessment Center Method, Atlanta, GA. 7) Ted H. Shore, George C.

Thornton, III, and L. McFarlane Shore, Construct Validity of Two Categories of Assessment Center Dimension Ratings, Personnel Psychology 43 (1990): 104. 8) Francis J. Aguilar. Managing Corporate Ethics. Oxford University Press, 1994.


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