ders towards business ethics conducted by Baumhart (1961). The author catalogued the salient ethical problems that business managers wanted to eliminate: gifts, gratuities, bribes, "call girls", price discrimination and unfair pricing, dishonest advertising, unfair competitive practices, cheating customers, unfair credit practices, overselling, price collusion by competitors, dishonesty in making or keeping a contract and unfairness to employees and prejudice in hiring. Brenner and Molander (1977) conducted a follow-up study and found the same set of undesirable practices. Today we need only to turn to our media or web page to problems in ethics in business, religion and government (Enron, Tyco, Texaco, Denny's Restaurants, and various televangelist ministers such as Jim Baker, Jimmy Swaggert and Creflo Dollar.).
Ethical Dimensions of Leadership
Ethical problems arise only when an individual interacts with other people (Bartels 1967). Ethical conflicts then occur when people perceive that their duties towards one group are inconsistent with their duties and responsibilities towards some other group, including oneself. Over the last decade, scholars have offered a number of models identifying the factors that influence ethical decision-making and organizational behavior (Hunt and Vitell, 1996; Ferrell and Gresham, 1985; Jones, 1991). Unfortunately, the numerous empirical studies, which have also attempted to describe ethical factors, while containing some interesting insights, have seldom been based upon any underlying theoretical foundation or framework (Murphy and Laczniak, 1981). Researchers have suggested a number of factors affecting ethical decision making and behavior, which generally fall into four categories: personal factors, inter-organizational factors, issue-related factors and extra-organizational factors. The personal factors category includes cognitive development (Ferrell and Gresham, 1985) and per...