Ethical Leadership in Business Essay
Ethics is specific standards set within an organization to guide employees. Business decisions are made based on these standards. Hence, they affect the way companies operate and how the company interacts with its employee, customer, the community, and other shareholders. Ethical leadership plays an important role and is known to be the most important factor that promotes productivity in workplaces.
Ethical leadership is associated with individual characteristics and includes honesty and trustworthiness. The importance of leadership cannot be underestimated, and the management sets the tone for every decision made within a company. Therefore, ethical leaders are considered as role models and have the ability to hold their employees accountable.
Leaders are looked upon as the key decision makers; they have a huge responsibility to ensure that all stakeholders are comfortable at all times. A leader with ethical morals exercises their duty by showing good examples and treating people fairly. Ethical leaders are more like role models and take moral identity as an important element. Thus, they behave in ways that are rational and logical. Individual moral identity means having specific behavior such as caring and being compassionate. Therefore, moral identity is linked to ethical leadership, which is further related to social behavior like charity.
Practicing ethical leadership is essential for those in authority because it makes a significant impact to his subordinates. Employees will behave ethically and avoid being unethical depending on the leaders’ action. Those in authority are in charge disciplining an employee who breaches any ethical code. Therefore, they lead by example. Ethical leadership emphasizes the need to acquire positive outcomes, but also obtaining these positive outcomes within specific ethical standards.
In leadership, transparency plays an important role in upholding the company’s image. To display ethical leadership means to set good examples for employees to enable them to follow the organization culture. It is about creating policies and code of conduct that are useful in setting straight what is expected of employees. It is important that employees feel safe within their work environment. Therefore, a conductive environment that fosters open communication is key in maintaining standard ethical practices. Whereby employees can feel free to report to the higher authority in case a senior officer behaves unethically.
One way organizations promote ethical leadership is by taking seriously any complaint forwarded by the employee. Organizations also need to offer ethic training regularly to help create a better ethical environment. As part of compliance efforts, the organization needs to invite motivational speakers to help employees see the sense of practicing ethical behavior. To ensure that ethical standards are maintained. Strict punishment should be administered to those violating the ethical standard. To promote ethical standards, the old employees and new employees should be aware of the organization’s’ code of ethics, and every employee should be aware of the organization’s core values.
Employees need to be guided to adopt appropriate behavior. Factors like integrity, sense of responsibility, discipline, emphasis on quality and teamwork need to be emphasized at all times. In today’s world, young people are ambitious and are eager to succeed using all means. Most employees are willing to engage in any means by foregoing their ethics and moral values to achieve success. It is important that part of the organization ongoing ethical compliance employees should be aware of the values and ethics required by the company.
In a nutshell, ethical leadership involves considering different factors that can affect employees and be mindful of employees. Ethical leadership is the most important element in business. Ethical leadership creates ethical workplaces thus leaders are expected to uphold certain values to maintain the integrity of the organization.
