Leader Centric Approaches versus Group-Centric Approaches Essay

Leader Centric Approaches versus Group-Centric Approaches - Essay Example Employees expect corporate company leaders to be people of superior character and serve as role models to their employees. Trust and commitment are very important in ethical leadership. Ethical standards of leaders should not be diverse from those of the followers. Ethical behavior â€Å"†¦means that which is morally right, as opposed to that which is legally or procedurally right† (Kanungo, 2001, p. 258). Despite nurturing leaders out of morally imperfect humans, we still expect them to perform in an exemplary manner despite the challenges they face in their managerial endeavors. Appreciating the moral characteristics and challenges of leaders is elemental in understanding the nature of leaders. It is thus important to understand the ethical failures of leaders in order to understand the development of leadership. Based on ethical values, motives, and assumptions, transformational and transactional leadership behaviors are considered ethical. Transformational leaders have moral philanthropic motives grounded in a deontological perspective. Transactional leaders, on the other hand, have atomistic mutually altruistic intentions based on a teleological perspective. Basically, â€Å"Transformational leadership appears to be most closely connected to deontology, while transactional leadership would seem to be related more to teleological ethics†.... Transactional leaders, on the other hand, have atomistic mutually altruistic intentions based on a teleological perspective (Burnes & By 2012; Kanungo, 2001). Basically, â€Å"Transformational leadership appears to be most closely connected to deontology, while transactional leadership would seem to be related more to teleological ethics† (Aronson, 2001, p. 245). Certain leadership traits are important for effective leadership, most leaders, particularly American leaders, lack them. These traits include the ability to inspire; vision, supportiveness, self-sacrifice, genuineness, personal responsibility; being non-egalitarian, not discriminatory, honest, and selfless. These traits are crucial and require societal acceptance for the development of effective leadership (Bertsch, 2012). Leadership Ethics Leaders tend to act as if they have a different code of ethics from that of their followers. According to Guillen and Gonzalez (2001), â€Å"Leadership goes beyond the scope of f ormal power and involves a continuous exchange of influence and free acceptance.† Leaders tend to justify their actions and make it appear as if the rightfulness or the wrongfulness of an action is dependent on the person doing the action (Bertsch, 2012, p.176). The main difference between the leader-centric approach and the group-centric approach lies in considering leaders as special in the leader-centric approaches and considering them as equal with their followers in the group-centric approach. Leader-centric ethics approaches tend to justify the actions of the leaders since they consider leaders as special entities who deserve special treatment on moral issues (Ciulla, 2001).On the other hand,