Leadership Qualities and Ethical Leadership
Leadership Qualities
Integrity
Integrity is one of the top leadership qualities. Integrity is crucial in various organizational aspects, including giving credit for employees’ accomplishments, ensuring employee safety, and acknowledging mistakes (Muteswa, 2016). Integrity is important in leadership because the failure to uphold it damages trust, which is hard to recover.
Great Communication Skills
Leaders also need exemplary communication skills to influence their followers. They cannot achieve any leadership goals if they lack good communication skills. Notably, attentive listening is also part of being a great communicator.
Decisiveness
Great leaders also should be decisive in decision-making. It is worth noting that leaders are not empowered to make decisions just because of their positions. Instead, they should be willing to take risks in decision-making and take responsibility if things go wrong (Muteswa, 2016). Decisiveness is essential because compromising leaders often delay decisions.
Role of Ethics in Leadership
One of the roles of ethics in leadership is that it enhances job satisfaction. Overwhelming evidence links job satisfaction and ethical leadership (Mihelic et al., 2010). For instance, fair, honest, and caring leaders create a happy workforce. Also, ethics encourages emotional commitment to the company. Emotional commitment emanates from day-to-day social interactions between leaders and followers (Mihelic et al., 2010). An ethical leader encourages employees to feel respected and valued, hence giving them a sense of importance. Another vital role of ethics in leadership is that it reduces workplace burnout. A workplace with ethical leaders is associated with positive workplace experiences such as job satisfaction and happiness. Such experiences play a significant role in capping the inevitable day-to-day workplace stressors.
Challenges of Being an Ethical Leader
While ethical leadership is critical in successfully running organizations, it presents a myriad of challenges. One such challenge is the ethical dilemma of balancing between monetary gain and moral standards (Mihelic et al., 2010). When faced with such a challenge, an ethical leader will choose a moral direction but face the backlash of investors or top executives. Another challenge of ethical leadership is that it is hard to maintain consistency. An ethical leader will encourage employees to respect others. However, their followers will no longer trust them if they find them disparaging others.
References
Mihelic, K. K., Lipicnik, B., & Tekavcic, M. (2010). Ethical Leadership. International Journal of Management & Information Systems (IJMIS), 14(5). https://doi.org/10.19030/ijmis.v14i5.11
Muteswa, R. (2016). Qualities of a Good Leader and the Benefits of Good Leadership to an Organization: A Conceptual Study. European Journal of Business and Management, 8(24). https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/234627475.pdf
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Question 
Rank the qualities you believe are most important for a leader to have. Explain why and how you ranked each quality.
Leadership Qualities and Ethical Leadership
Explain the role of ethics in leadership, including the strengths and challenges of being an ethical leader.