ABSTRACT
In a 1999 article, Leonard Minkes and colleagues review the relationships between organizational leadership, corporate governance, and business ethics. For our purposes, though, the most important contributions are their definition of the relatively new concept of corporate governance and a set of questions we can ask ourselves when facing ethical dilemmas. As the authors suggest, “Organizational effectiveness and organizational efficiency, formerly central issues for practising managers . . . have now been augmented by an awareness of issues in business ethics, and a requirement for members of the corporate governance to behave in more socially responsible ways” (Minkes et al. 1999, 327). In other words, corporate governance refers to the requirement for socially responsible behavior, frequently defined as ethics, on the part of organizational leaders at the highest levels.
