ABSTRACT
Ethics anchors personal and mission integrity. Ethics and character become the focal point for shared cognitive frameworks of judgment that build a culture of performance and commitment to public purposes. These frameworks operationalize ethical decision making. Managerial leadership, well-designed incentives and structure enable ethics to be a resource of public purpose organizations. They are the obligations of good leaders and managers. Ethics focuses and fills in the reflective space in discretion. Ethics deepens organizational missions to recognize the true stakes for public organizations such as long-range and deep moral stakes for vulnerable populations, long-term social welfare or market failure. The ethics and integrity of persons and the performance daily tasks earn and reinforce an organization’s legitimacy. Daily ethical actions embody the organization’s culture and are the foundation for consistent, fair, competent and reliable performance. Ethics reinforces respect for equal human dignity to drive organizations to recruit and diversify their human resources, points of view and professional skills. Managerial leaders build teams of diverse people, skills and views into a common purpose to serve the public good and address the inequality and tensions around differences such as class, gender, race, ethnicity and religion.
