Joanne B Ciulla

This talk explores how visual images of leaders impact our perception and emotional response to them. Our reactions to leaders’ pictures reflect and shape our implicit ideas of leadership. People’s perceptions and feelings about leaders are often so strong that, like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, they only see shadows of reality. Even when people recognize that their perceptions are biased or inaccurate, they are often uninterested in verifying what they think they see, as the image is what they believe ought to be true. In the age of social media, some prefer to chain themselves to their cell phone caves to watch the shadows of reality created and endorsed by like-minded prisoners. This situation makes one wonder if people get the leaders they deserve.

Designed for undergraduate, graduate, and executive business ethics courses, Honest Work: A Business Ethics Reader demonstrates that business ethics is primarily about the ethics of individuals. With a unique focus on the personal dimension of ethics, it challenges students to consider the relationship between the ways in which people do business and the kind of lives they want to live. It features 105 brief articles and 70 real-life case studies and poses study questions at the end of each reading and chapter. In addition, a chapter on leadership explores the relationship between leadership and ethical behavior in business.

The purpose of this dissertation is to refocus and reconceptualize the current discussion of meaningful work. Utilizing Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of a practice as a conceptual tool, I look at the ways in which moral values have been associated with work. Changes that occur during the industrial revolution led to a distinct separation of economic value from social and moral values. What I suggest, is that this separation of social and moral ideals from the modern experience of work has resulted in the "de-moralization" of work in the twentieth century. It is from this kind of "de-moralization" that the quest for meaningful work emerges. ;This dissertation falls within the realm of Applied Philosophy and lays the groundwork for an ethical analysis of the workplace.

The focus of this paper is on the issues that need to be addressed to educate the next generation of leaders. I will argue that to meet the tumultuous challenges of the twenty-first century, we will have to develop moral imagination in business leaders and leaders in all sectors of society. To explore this issue, we’ll look at some of the general moral aspects of leadership itself, and then I’ll illustrate some of the moral challenges and opportunities business leaders face in their organizations and in international business.

In today's business world, ethics is not simply a peripheral concern of executive boards or a set of supposed constraints on free enterprise. Ethics stands at the very core of our working lives and of society as a whole, defining the public image of the business community and the ways in which individual companies and people behave. What people do at work--and how they think about work--determines their attitudes and aspirations, affecting and even structuring their personal lives and habits. Working from this premise, Honest Work: A Business Ethics Reader provides a practical overview of business ethics that concentrates on the ethical problems and dilemmas students are most likely to face in their prospective work environments. Classic and recent articles and cases cover a broad spectrum of issues and concerns--from private ethical dilemmas to larger considerations of corporate values--and propose guidelines for thinking about the business world in a moral context. Each reading and case is followed by lively questions for discussion. Offering a welcome alternative to the impersonal tone of most business ethics texts, the editors address students in an appealing and conversational manner. They provide engaging chapter introductions that include personal narratives and also present the ideas of great philosophers in a unique way--as emails. Ideal for introductory undergraduate and MBA courses in business ethics, Honest Work: A Business Ethics Reader can be read as a coherent narrative but also offers instructors great flexibility, as its various chapters, readings, and cases can be pursued in almost any order. A Companion Website featuring chapter objectives and summaries, study questions, self-tests, and off-site links of interest will soon be available. An Instructor's Manual with Test Bank is available to adopters.

In some ways it is more important to understand why it is difficult for leaders to be ethical than it is to understand how to be an ethical leader. By being aware of the common temptations and moral pitfalls of leadership, leaders are better able to avoid them. Like all areas of applied ethics, leadership has its own set of problems that stem from the roles leaders play and their relationship and responsibilities to followers and others. Moreover, leadership is ethically challenging because it and requires control of the self, the ego, and the use of power. This article examines some of the aspects of leadership that make it ethically difficult.

This article is a personal account of how I see the field, based on work I have performed alone and with others over the last 14 years. I will highlight the problems I have encountered, some areas that beg to be explored, and most importantly, some excellent new contributions to the field.1 Again, I emphasize that the field is still young and open for development. Please regard my take on it as a heuristic, not something set in stone. The goal of this paper is to stimulate research. I am eager to see more scholars from outside the USA writing on leadership ethics.2 We cannot begin to understand subjects like ethics and leadership without research from various disciplines, cultures, and points of view.