TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP and EXECUTIVE ETHICS

CAN TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Given the number of scandals over recent years with respect to the shady, amoral, immoral and often criminal behavior on the part of multinational CEOs and other executives, it is becoming more and more important to be able to identify such behavior before it does irreparable damage: both to individual firms and to the economy as a whole. This is even more crucial today when multinational roots have spread throughout the world and glnbalization has baused an intertwining of economies so that a scandal in New York will have serious repercussions in Singapore.

Among the key questions both researchers and practitioners are asking themselves are:

Is there a way to define leadership qualities, styles and abilities so as to be able to identify a type of leader who can improve business ethics?

More specifically, does one specific type of leadership enable business ethics more than other types?

If so, is transformational leadership the one that makes a difference when it comes to the improvement of business ethics?

It is the contention of this paper that, despite the high-level and desirable qualities shown by a transformational leader, the mere fact of a person being defined as a transformational leader does not necessarily mean that the firm's business ethics will be improved. In fact, the opposite may well be the truth with transformational CEOs prepared to impose their vision

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them: The values they espouse. For example, universal brotherhood for Gandhi and King; us/them superior/inferior good/evil for Hitler and Farrakhan. How they channel need for power. True leaders are socially constructive; pseudos are self-aggrandizing, deceptive, domineering, and demand blind obedience. Lockman (1995) sums it up (and perhaps his summing up could be used for the general political leadership situation in the United States today rather than just a few aberrations): "People like Rush Limbaugh and Louis Farrakhan live well off ignorance � They are smart, ambitious men with great charisma, who look like giants to people of minor intellect. They are snake oil salesmen � confidence men who exploit � ignorant, scared, angry, frustrated people for personal gain in the name of doing good for entire nation or race" (p. 9A). True leaders beget other leaders; pseudos want to keep their followers down. True leaders push for ideals; pseudos push to become idols. Despite his breakdown of the differences between real and pseudo transformational leaders, even Bass (1998) has to admit that, in the end, the difference is mostly in the eye of the follower: "For the Iranian Islamic revolutionaries, Khomeini was a saint a true trans

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