The Ethical Leadership

Introduction

In the present day liberalization and with the spread of globalizations leadership has been going a trough tremendous change. With such changes, maintaining ethical leadership at workplace is one of the prime challenges faced by the corporate of present times, Bellingham (2003). The Ethical leadership has long been considered as the "good character"; an individual having "right values" or being a person of "strong character", but in reality the ethical leadership is far more complex. Ethical Leadership involves leading with the approaches that not only achieve the targets but also respects the rights and dignity of others including the team members, subordinates as well as the stakeholders, Freeman and Stewart (2006).

Under such circumstances in our present case study our aim is to understand various aspects of ethical leadership in a work responsibility of Information Systems with respect to the team management and job insecurity issues. The purpose of this research is to ascertain how ethical leadership can help and support in dealing with issues.

I am the leader in our present case study of Information systems. I am a Software Quality Assurance Manager with a working experience of over seventeen years in Software Testing, Test Supervision, and Test Management and off shore approach across the areas of Testing. I manage around 20 people in US and 30+ individuals off shore.

In this case, the leader after putting in a lot of hard work has been able to make a team which is highly efficient and task oriented. In a project management and testing management of IT services, the testing manager's role is extremely challenging. As a leader the testing manager need to take care of the entire team and needs to make sure that all the members are getting sufficient challenging work. However due to Govt. laws, the Govt. projects that are offered to the team are subject to Govt. clearance and follow the bidding procedure. The upper management do the bidding which is generally a not known to the lower level managers. So, when they do not bag the required number of projects or the projects do not clear security requirements, the managers ask to lay off some of the team members because of security clearance issues.

The goal of the project is to raise the critical issue of the process of laying off people who doesn't have security clearance to work on government projects, if the organization is not being able to obtain the required amount of projects. When these upper level managers are not able to acquire a good number of projects due to various genuine reasons, the leader's team members suffer and face retrenchment. Now, there is an ethical dilemma with the leader, as a cohesive team that performs well takes years to build. Now, the leader has to let go off some of his team members.

This ethical issue cannot be addressed in the traditional market mechanism, as, in that model, the decision of the leaders cannot be challenged and it has been assumed that they take decisions in the best interest of their people. So, this dilemma needs to be solved using some modern theories. The leader who has been following the leadership method which included low interference but full support and guidance to the team members, has now been put into an ethical dilemma on how to handle this lay off and which of the leadership style he should adopt.

The Situational Leadership Theory that was developed by Professor Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard based on characterized leadership style on Task Behavior and Relationship Behavior. The Contingency Model of leadership style suggests for leader-member relationships, task structure and positional power.

This project is ethically commendable because in the process of maximizing the economies of scale for the company, the interests of the lower level employees are being ignored. These employees who are facing layoffs for no fault of theirs would have to look for other ways to survive. They would be having families to support and would face all the unemployment problems. So, the leader needs to support them. Also, as a leader, I would face further problems in building