Ethical Leadership Is Mostly About Leader Integrity

Business ethics, often known as corporate ethics, is described as the type of ethics that occurs in a business setting to define the limits of ethical adherence and moral action in that environment. Yet, business ethics has been misread and misunderstood, resulting in numerous controversial corporate scandals occurring throughout the entire global corporate culture (Kazeroony, 2014). As a result of misinterpretation and confusion in understanding business ethics, various fictional business ethics have emerged, evading the commercial world. Some of the most frequent business ethics myths are as follows. Perhaps due to the fact that everyone has their own personal approaches to certain issues, business ethics has been framed s being easy, owing to the fact that each employee is trusted to do the right thing in a given circumstance. However, ethical decisions come with a lot of complexity in them and require moral consciousness to address the issue at hand. After reading the article it is clear that ethical decision making is underestimated and that most people don’t.t realize the difficulty involved in making a dilemmatic decision, especially when working under pressure. Moreover, pressure in the organization elicits complexity in decision making due to the high standards of results expected from an individual and fear of the consequences of their decisions.

Myth 2: Ethical Leadership Is Mostly About Leader Integrity

The mythology of ethical leadership focuses mainly on personal attributes such as honesty, integrity, and fairness; however ethical leadership focuses on more than just personal characters, and begs for a strong personal character (Trevino, 2004). Ethical leadership requires a leader who will set the most desirable behavior path for his employees to follow.for one to be ethical it is important that he displays that he is ethical and accountable at all times

Myth 3: Ethics Can Be Managed Through Formal Ethics Codes and Programs

Most organizations set up a code of ethics that each employee is supposed to follow to ensure sanity in the face of work. As much as the codes have been seen to be of help they are however not as effective as expected, this is because of lack of existence of a cultural system encouraging ethical conduct throughout one's maturity from childhood (Trevino, 2004). Take for example a lady who is used to wearing short clothing, she is less likely to adhere to a code of ethics put up since she has grown up knowing short dresses are almost decent as any other kind of clothing. Clearly guiding employees’ code of conduct sometimes only leads to them steering away from the ethical thing to do.

Myth 4: Unethical Behavior in Business is simply the Result of “Bad Apples”

The myth of the bad apples suggests that if all the bad apples in an organization are gotten rid of the operations of h organization returns to normalcy. However, this is certainly not the case since most individuals tend to behave according to the forces around them (Trevino, 2004). Some look for guidance and opinions from their colleagues while others succumb to the misleading forces existence in the organization. Looking for a second opinion does not mean in any way that one is a bad apple. Furthermore, I have learned adult are not fully matured ethically and every day is an opportunity for them to mature ethically.

Myth 5: People Are Less Ethical Than They Used To Be

The media has greatly contributed to this myth due to the fact that they over exaggerate corporate scandals which bring out the picture that people have become less ethical than before. Reality, however, indicates that unethical behaviors have been in existences for a very long time only that now they have become known to the public eye. Surprisingly most employees believe that the level of ethical appropriateness has greatly increased over time with most employees observing the code of ethics. It is clear that unethical behaviors have ben preexistence; however, it is important for the management of an organization to use such occurrences to develop ways to curb unethical issues.

References

In Kazeroony, H. H., & In Stachowicz-Stanusch, A. (2014). Capitalism and the social relationship: An organizational perspective.

Trevino, L. K.& Brown, M. E .(2004).Managing to be ethical: Debunking five business myths. Academy of Management Executive 18(2), 69-81.