TERRY L. PRICE, LEADERSHIP ETHICS: AN INTRODUCTION.
This Book gives a detail view about, Are Leaders Morally Special? Is there something ethically distinctive about the relationship between leaders and followers? Should Leaders do whatever it takes to achieve group goals? Leadership ethics draws on both moral theory and empirical research in psychology to evaluate the reasons everyday leaders give to justify breaking the rules. It introduced me to the moral theories that are relevant to leadership ethics: relativism, amoralism, egoism, virtue ethics, social contract theory, situation ethics, communitarianism, and cosmopolitan theories such as utilitarianism and transformational leadership and so on.
This book Leadership Ethics consist of 252 pages ant it is divided into two parts.
Part 1. Tells about the LEADER-CENTRIC APPROACHES and it has four chapters such as
1. Relativism and Exceptionalism
2. Reason and Amorlism
3. Power and Self-Interest
4. Traits and Virtues
Part 2. Tells about the GROUP-CENTRIC APPROACHES and it has five chapters such as
5. Permission and Consent
6. situations and Circumstance
7. Membership and Moral Particularity
8. The Greater Good and
9. Everyday Leadership Ethics
The reasons just described in this book are simply potential Justifications for rule breaking. To carry out this task, the Author Terry L. Price devotes a chapter to each potential Justification. Each potential justification also links up with a particular moral theory. The book is written in a very simple language and in very good systematic organized way, so that even the people without the background in philosophy can also understand it.
While we go through Part I, "Leader-Centric Approaches," we will be getting focused on moral Theories that give particular weight to the beliefs, desires, ends, and characteristics of leaders. The moral Relativism captures the idea that a leader's rule-breaking behavior and his behavior might be justified by his own moral belief or those of his society. "Because he/she has his/her own morality their own code of ethics." And when we go deeper and deeper we can clearly know the amoral character of some leaders because they do not care about morality. And some others have egoism; this view privileges the desires and ends of everyday leader, essentially encouraging him to use his power as a leader to break the rules "because he/ she can." And some other leaders are moral because they are special, because morality is more about being than doing, a person can be virtuous without an unyielding commitment to the moral rules. Indeed, morality may require rule breaking.
Terry L. Price defines leadership as leader inducing followers to act for certain goals that represent the values and the motivations – the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations – of both leaders and followers to act… Leadership, unlike naked power wielding, is thus inseparable from followers' needs and goals. The essence of leader-follower relation is the interaction of persons with different level of motivations and of power potential, including skill, in pursuit of a common or at least joint purpose.
Leader effectiveness
This book also identifies several characteristics of effective leader that are associated with managerial effectiveness. The effective leaders differ from ineffective leaders – and from followers – in terms of:
1. Energy level and stress tolerance
2. Self- confidence
3. Locus of control
4. Power motivation
5. Achievement orientation
6. Need for afflictions
7. Emotional stability and maturity
8. Personal Integrity
Are effective leaders morally special? To answer this Question, we need to look at a particular kind of trait – Namely, Virtues. Virtues are personal Dispositions to respond in morally appropriate ways. There are two general virtues associated with effective leadership: (1) emotional stability and maturity; and (2) personal integrity. Both of these characteristic have clear moral dimensions. First, virtue theory such as Aristotle suggest that morality involves not just appropriate action but appropriate feeling, and we might expect that emotionally developed leaders are more likely to feel the right way in response to the various situations they face.
Second, morality is an explicit component of personal integrity. Trait theory understands integrity to mean "that a persons behavior is consistent with espoused values, and the person is honest, ethical and thrust worthy." This conception of integrity combines person's authenticity with correct moral values.
Aristotle defines virtue "by reference to reason, i.e., to the reason by reference to which the intelligent person would define it." According to virtue theory,"An action is right if and only if it is what a virtuous person would do, adding reliably or the like since virtue is a matter of character."
Transforming leadership
The author also cites from James MacGregor Burns's 1978 book Leadership made him the father of leadership studies. In this work he develops a normative theory of leadership. That transforming leaders are more concerned with end-values, such as liberty, justice, equality than with "modal values that is values of means – honesty, responsibility, fairness, the honoring of commitments." In short, they are more concerned with cosmopolitan values than with moral rules. He does not suggest that the modal values are unimportant, only that they are less important than the end-values. Transforming leadership "operates at need and value levels higher than those of potential follower." This form of leadership moves people away from an ethics of self-interest, partiality and blind conformity toward conceptions of morality that reject particularity and embrace universal moral principles.
This book is very much helpful to know the moral theories that are relevant to leadership ethics. So by learning this we can analyze our every day leaders whether they are those who are morally transforming leaders or villainous leaders where as those who use their leadership positions to feed desires for excessive power and luxury.
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