Abstract

Being both ethical and successful is challenging. The rewards of unethical behavior are often greater than the price paid for misbehavior. This book explains why leaders, seeking to run ethical and successful organizations, cannot depend only on the law and their organizations to make moral business decisions. The authors explore why making ethical business decisions is harder than is generally understood, and explores the difficulties leaders face as a result of differences in context, circumstances, and other challenges to ethical behavior, such as misleading rhetoric, inappropriate role models, cognitive dissonance and motivated forgetting. They argue that individuals need to establish ethical baselines that they will not cross when making decisions and explain how to do this systematically. The Challenge of Leading an Ethical and Successful Organization offers ways of handling ethical dilemmas successfully. It explores the need to determine in advance the potential areas of ethical conflict, and the potential costs of such conflicts and provides leaders with a practical ethical framework to reconcile ethics with business success. This book is essential reading for professionals, consultants, and academics interested in the ethics of leadership and management.