NAVIGATING ETHICAL AND MORAL CHALLENGES LEADERS FACE IN STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM

One can assume that the ethical business leader of the 21st century will need to become a leader of community in which they operate, answering to all stakeholders, guiding all stakeholders, mediating all stakeholders’ concerns. A virtuous position at first glance and one leader wants to aspire to in theory but frequently fail at in practice. The current paper strives to underline the need of ethical conduct at both leader and stakeholders’ level and proposes the introduction of a code of ethical principles to be followed and introduced by the leader and all stakeholders in an organization. Such a code should promote a set of well-established principles to be agreed and followed by the parties involved. A five criteria set is proposed for the development of further codes of conduct, that will lead to more appropriate judgements and findings

Why leadership fails? Few causes for why good leaders do bad things:

The six factors considered for achieving success in leadership are clarity, role modeling, achievability, commitment, transparency and openness. The article analyzes the factors that generate a failure of leadership, even for the so-called widely renewed good leaders, precisely the behavior causes and developments that lead to failure and not their acquiring process. The chosen target population is represented by the leaders ruling large organizations, which need an integrated vision to produce effective leadership. The perspective will have a theoretical basis but also an empirical one. The quantitative part relies on a survey conducted among leaders for three different industries (pharmaceutical, IT and telecom). They were asked questions regarding the causes, which produce leadership failure and finally produce misconduct and breaches of the compliance rules and regulations. In addition, the survey asked the participants to develop their proposals for preventing leadership failure. It was established the importance of the tone from the top, leading by example, a clear mechanism for checking the health of the organization from a leadership perspective. The article will also show that the way to prevent leadership failure and avoid behaviors that lead to misconduct is a permanent journey