Question

What are the challenges associated with leadership ethics? Describe the five steps Taylor Cox suggests need to be developed to help generate a multicultural organization or pluralistic company culture.

Answer 1

Challenges associated with leadership ethics are:

• The leader doesn’t know the outcomes of his ethical behavior and so are skeptical about it. For e.g. when subordinates are briefed about ethics they feel the leader is blaming them for being unethical. Leaders have also found that followers take undue advantage of their ethical conduct.
• To operationalize ethics while leading in real world is difficult as different followers need to be appeased simultaneously. Being ethical to one can be vice versa to other. It gives rise to ethical conflicts.
• Leaders get into circumstances where company practices discourage them to follow ethics. This causes them distress.

Describe the five steps Taylor Cox suggests need to be developed to help generate a multicultural organization or pluralistic company culture:

• The companies should ensure that the multicultural groups should keep good communication among them and facilitate learning of each other’s culture. This way their tolerance for each other becomes high.
• The company should spread people belonging to same cultural subgroups widely in organization to trigger communication with others. This way perceptual bias could decrease.
• The organization should reform its grapevine and make it more embedded with formal lines of communication.
• All people should have strong company identification.
• Companies should devise ways to lower down conflicts related to group identification.