Ethical Leadership Style and Its Impact on Decision-Making

Abstract

The ethical failures of organizational leaders have led to the development of instruments seeking to measure ethical leadership. These instruments have primarily focused on followers’ evaluation of ethical leadership attributes of their leaders. Often leaders find themselves faced with making challenging ethical decisions. In the current article, we present a validated leadership self-assessment tool that measures leader’s preferred ethical leadership style. The current article concludes that, when faced with making a decision addressing an ethical dilemma, leaders prefer a particular ethical leadership style. Knowledge of ethical leadership style is beneficial for leaders to understand the process they utilize when faced with difficult choices. This tool may be useful in developing and educating leaders, teams, and organizations to make better decisions, thereby reducing incidents of poor ethical choices.