Bringing together different perspectives on ethical leadership

Abstract

Recent corporate scandals, including the mortgage situation precipitating the global financial crisis in 2008, have led many people to question the role of un/ethical leadership in corporate misbehaviour. Organizational scholars contribute to our understanding of ethical leadership by investigating and theorizing within ethical leadership in corporate misbehaviour. Organizational scholars contribute to our understanding of ethical leadership by investigating and theorizing within the organizational justice, trust, business ethics and leadership literatures. Unfortunately, work relating to ethical leadership from these different subfields has rarely been brought together, despite common themes and concerns. As a result, the accumulated insights have been described as ‘underdeveloped and fragmented’ (Brown and Trevin˜o, 2006), leading some researchers to call for better integration of these literatures (van Knippenberg et al., 2007; De Cremer, Mayer and Schminke, 2010; Rupp et al., 2010).