ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to reinforce the former and minimize the latter by briefly defining values and ethics, and then examines professionals and moral development, individual ethics, and organizational integrity. Leaders without basic ethics skills are professionally illiterate. This is what makes the execrable corporate, not-for-profit, and governmental scandals of recent years so devastating. Many professionals in a variety of fields, management, law, securities, policy, accounting, banking, have demonstrated a lack of understanding of this fundamental precept. Professional socialization can equip leaders to anticipate problems, recognize when they occur, and provide frameworks for thinking about issues. Professionals strive to make decisions at the highest level of moral development. They cannot form judgments solely from the self-interested level-one perspective. Professional ethics is more like an art than a science; instead of expecting definitive technical solutions, an aesthetic perspective appreciates that conflict is essential and productive.
