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Ethical Failure and Leadership: Treatment and Selection

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Debating Bad Leadership

Part of the book series: Palgrave Debates in Business and Management ((PDBM))

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Abstract

Leadership introduces distinctive risks of ethical failure. These risks are often associated with the heightened responsibilities of leadership and the necessary inequality that leading a group often involves. But people who are prone to ethical failure are also prone to self-selection into leadership positions. In order to understand and prevent ethical failure in leadership, it is not enough to take steps to address and prevent ethical failure among existing leaders. Rather, avoiding ethical failure may also require rethinking the ways that leaders are selected.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ludwig and Longenecker (1993) also develop a version of this explanation when they speculate that leaders who make serious moral mistakes may do so because they come to overidentify with their institutional role or their status as leaders, which causes them to overlook their moral obligations.

  2. 2.

    For example, organizations could adopt ranked-choice voting or approval voting, which some speculate could reduce polarization. On the other hand, the evidence is mixed with respect to whether voting procedure reforms would effectively reduce polarization and partisanship in selecting leaders. For an overview of some of these issues, see Livni (2019).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, USA

    Jessica Flanigan

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  1. Jessica Flanigan
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Correspondence to Jessica Flanigan .

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  1. Department of Working Life and Innovation School of Business and Law, University of Agder, Grimstad, Norway

    Anders Örtenblad

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Flanigan, J. (2021). Ethical Failure and Leadership: Treatment and Selection. In: Örtenblad, A. (eds) Debating Bad Leadership. Palgrave Debates in Business and Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65025-4_5

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