Individual : Leaders Shadows - Term Paper Example

w casters are inclined to unhealthy motivations, faulty thinking or mistaken assumptions, failure of moral imagination and moral disengagement, lack of ethical expertise, and contextual pressures. When examining leadership behaviors to qualify them as ethical or unethical, different questions arise. Does the behavior contribute to the achievement of the teams’ objectives and overall company objective? Or is the leader’s influence to the team positively effective or is it negative? Exploring these issues will clearly provide an insight as to the various forms of unethical behaviors, described as shadow casting.

Findings reveal that leaders who propagate shadow casting mismanage information, abuse power, hoard privileges, act inconsistently, betray loyalties, and fail to assume responsibilities. Therefore, the essay analyzes the unethical leadership behaviors that modern day leaders exercise and reflects on ethical leadership practices. There may be a thin line between ethical and unethical differences but whichever choice leaders make, they impact not only on their personal performance but also organization’s performance.

Leaders should adopt ethical behaviors since they are role models of other employees who aspire to become a leader someday. Leadership ethics is a responsibility of those in leadership positions. The ways in which leaders handle their responsibility power, privileges, information and consistency determine leadership motives; and whether leaders cast shadows or light. Dark shadow is associated with unethical leadership while light shadow relates to ethical leadership. It is widely known that more power we have, the more the authority.

Power comes from a variety of sources. The five bases of power include coercive power, legitimate power, reward power, role-model power and expert power. Power enables a leader to reward or punish but is also susceptible to abuse. Power abuse behaviors include deceit, constraint, coercion, selfishness,