the anatomy of ethical leadership

terms of ethical behaviour at work, however. Research on ethics and management is unanimous: a person in a position of authority who trivializes this type of behaviour implicitly accepts such behaviour, thus opening the door to organizational deviance. Ethical leadership is a concept that is increasingly making its mark on certain areas of administrative science. The concept did not appear all at once but rather emerged by means of a piecemeal analysis of how a manager should act. This rather Kantian dimension (respect for laws, norms, duties, and so on) was brought forward in , when Chester Barnards The Functions of the Executive appeared. Barnard broaches the topic of ethics by mentioning the obligation of the manager to respect the moral sense that exists within an organization and to resolve disputes that arise as this code is applied. It was only just before the s, however, that we began to see ethics appearing in the literature on management, notably that concerning the structure of the workplace and the conduct appropriate thereto, as part of an analysis of bureaucracy and its perverse effects on human behaviour, with the focus falling on behaviour qualied as unacceptable. For example, Robert Jackall carried out an in-depth analysis of ethos in bureaucracy in The Moral Ethos of Bureaucracy () and, some years later, called attention to the lack of ethics among managers in Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers (). The details that emerged document the distortions of a bureaucracy that, pushed to an extreme, proves to reveal a agrant lack of ethics. The application of procedures to govern all administrative action, along with the reduction of conscience and behaviour to a set of standards, impede people in their efforts to act and to behave in a responsible manner. Maintaining, at all costs, a culture of management shackled by the dictates of a market economy results in a loss of meaning at work. In such a context, the goal is prot, regardless of the cost and long-term effects on people and the environment. The perverse effect of all this is that, by constantly looking to control behaviour at work, managers curtail the capacities and
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