Leadership, Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility

Organisational leaders and their employees still struggle with ethical decisions making, engineering ethical behaviours, and attaining corporate social responsibility (see Cheng, Bai & Yang, 2019). Celebrated organizational unethical behaviors are common. For example, the worldcom telecommunications company referred to as MCI inflated assets by as much as $11billion resulting in 30, 000 job losses and $180 billion losses for investors (see Rodriguez, 2013; Soltani, 2014). The company CEO was the major culprit. Similarly, Enron’s shareholders lost $74 billion’ while large numbers of workers lost their retirement accounts and jobs when the organisation filed for bankruptcy. Again, Eron’s Senior Executive and CEOs were involved in the fraud (Rodriguez, 2013) in 2006. The above unethical behaviours by organisational leaders are still fresh in our memories. Additionally, there are current ethical debates about excessive executive pay levels, the use of the environment, fake news, and inclusive practices. These cases and current debates raise significant questions about ethical leadership and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Leadership is about influence (Yukl, 2002), and leadership literature is replete with differing leadership styles and traits that relate to organisational performance (Yasir & Mohamad, 2015). However, we are aware that the leadership skills and styles of a leader may not be enough to build an ethical organisation (Brown, et al., 2005). In this regard, the ethical orientation, values, and integrity of a leader are as critical as the leadership styles and skills in promoting ethical behaviour among employees and consequently in the organisation (see Carlson and Perrewe, 1995). This means that the challenge of creating an ethical organisation remains strongly with organisational leadership and top management team and especially the need for the leader to have strong ethical orientation such, as honesty and integrity (Kirkpatrick & Locke, 1991). The leader and the top management team must be ethical to co-create the ethical tone in the organisation (Brown & Treviño, 2014). While ethical leadership may be difficult to define, there is a consensus among researchers that it includes a “demonstration of normatively appropriately conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through a two -way communication, reinforcement and decision -making” (Brown et al., 2005). Ethical leaders are expected to behave in appropriate and credible ways in the context they are operating while engaging in ethical discussion and drawing subordinates’ attention to ethical issues in their organisations. Additionally, they set clear guidelines to regulate their subordinates’ behaviour by setting transparent ethical standards and reinforcing them through reward and disciplinary systems. They also weigh up the ethical consequences of their decisions and make moral choices that can be emulated by their subordinates (Brown et al., 2005). More importantly, ethical leadership aims at moral management and may overlap with other leadership styles (Brown et al, 2005; Ko, Ma, Bartnik, Haney & Kang, 2018). With this background in mind, we present the eight papers in this issue (28.1). These papers touch on four critical themes: leadership styles and ethical issues, leadership, ethical behaviors and employee voice, ethical culture and climate, supervisor and ethical behaviours, and Ethics and CSR.