Chapter 13: Developing Ethical Leaders: A Servant Leadership Approach

Over the past decade, we have seen numerous high-profile scandals in both the private and public sectors: for example, Enron, Bernard Madoff, Lehman Brothers, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill (Baker, Hunt, & Andrews, 2006). These scandals have raised important questions about the role that leaders play—and should play—in fostering and defining ethical conduct in organizations (Härtel & Ganegoda, 2008). In these examples, leaders modeled negative behaviors in the workplace, which research has shown to be associated with subsequent negative employee behaviors, including self-serving (Brown, Treviño, & Harrison, 2005; Schyns & Schilling, 2013) and deviant activities (Tepper, Carr, Breaux, Geider, Hu, & Hua, 2009). These behaviors are in contrast to the community expectation that leaders need to do the opposite: to model ethical leadership behaviors including fairness, integrity, and adherence to high moral standards. By so doing, leaders would be fostering positive employee behaviors (Brown et al., 2005) and discouraging undesirable self-serving behaviors (Zhang, Walumbwa, Aryee, & Chen, 2013).