This research seeks to explore the inevitable internal struggle experienced by school leaders when making ethically‐informed judgments. The study acquired principals' intimate reflections about professional decision making in response to personal versus organizational and/or professional value discrepancy as identified in the ethic of the profession and its model for promoting students' best interests.
A modified phenomenological research method, appropriate for an educational research context, was used to capture administrators' perspectives about moral practice and decision‐making experiences. The primary data collection strategy was participant interviews by means of purposeful sampling.
A clash between personal beliefs and values and organizational/professional expectations was very real for participants. The experience was generally frequent, but varied among principals. The struggle can be characterized as a phenomenon of intrapersonal moral discord experienced as part of the process of deciding ethically when faced with difficult moral choices.
The study contributes to the understanding of moral conflict in school leadership as an intrapersonal moral phenomenon, and how the conflict is resolved in practice, while providing insights into a more recently defined and theorized professional ethic for educational leadership. The study offers empirically derived knowledge for theory building and offers conceptual clarification of the moral leadership construct.
Moral judgment was complicated and contextually defined for participants. Administrators reported various ways of dealing with the nuances of personal and organizational value incongruity in order to engage in ethical decision making, including relying on, in some instances, a fundamental professional injunction.
