Leadership Ethics and Organizational Change: Sketching the Field's Challenges

Abstract

This chapter addresses the link between leadership ethics and organizational change. Leadership ethics as the overarching label for questions on ethics, fairness, legitimacy, and sustainability in the context of leadership remains a fragmented field. Within it, we find a variety of competing and contradictory efforts that focus on different research foci of leadership's new challenges. In the chapter, we set out to outline the new challenges of globally responsible leadership at the onset of the 21st century and to critically discuss different perceptions of and approaches to ‘good leadership’. Globalization, new societal role, and ethical pluralism pose substantial challenges for a new understanding of leadership, especially in change processes. Furthermore, researchers and practitioners are faced with a research field that is characterized by a pluralism of different labels, research foci, and research methodologies. The divide between positivist and post-positivist approaches inhibits efforts for a comprehensive perception of what good leadership means for present and future businesses. By sketching these challenges of leadership ethics, we hope to foster the understanding of the characteristics of responsible global leadership and to improve the dialog between existing research strands within this emerging field.