ABSTRACT
In many cases of bad leadership, a large part of the badness is in what leaders get followers to do. To engage “the full person of the follower,” transforming leaders move beyond the morally neutral motives to which transactional leadership appeals. Moral leadership, that is, aims at something higher. Ethical leadership is “the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making”. Naming something ethical leadership no more settles the matter at hand than does calling something the true leadership theory make it true. Indeed, the moral-manager function suggests that the primary aim of ethical leadership is the achievement of an ethical, not organizational, objective. The primacy of targets’ values also explains why philosophers and leadership scholars sometimes conclude that influence attempts that are in the interest of the targets of influence avoid a charge of manipulation.
