Does Moral Leadership Conflict With Organizational Innovation?

Abstract

The current article explores the concept of moral leadership and the potential for conflict with organizational innovation. After exploring the organizational prioritization of profitability with the exclusion of moral and ethical implications, the article asserts that moral leadership need not be the center of conflict with organizational innovation. Instead, research reveals that moral leadership can serve to enhance, inspire, and provide the foundation needed for innovation. For this reason, organizations must strive to make the identification of ethical leadership as a priority and stakeholders must remain flexible while upholding ethical standards. Through enhanced moral leadership, organizations can achieve greater levels of innovative excellence and competitive advantage in the global economy.

Linking ethical leadership to administrative innovation in Ethiopian banks: the mediating role of knowledge process capabilities

“…Comparably, followers start to put their optimum energy to receive expected benefits from their ethical leaders (Trevino et al, 2000). If ethical leaders can care and concern for the wellbeing of their followers and treat them fairly through creating pro-social relationships, followers can certainly be motivated and energized to improve as well as innovate the existing administrative systems (Nunn and Avella, 2015;Javed et al, 2016). Thus, this study proposed the following hypothesis: H1.…”

“…The focus of AI is applying new ideas to get better human resource developments, administrative processes and organizational structures (Damanpour, 1987). In order to be competitive and productive within today's turbulent economy, an organization should strengthen its managerial innovative capability through applying ethics-related leadership (Ryan et al, 2013;Yidong and Xinxin, 2013;Nunn and Avella, 2015;Ozsungur, 2019) and enhancing knowledgeenabling capabilities (Kor and Maden, 2013;Vidal et al, 2013;Ruoslahti, 2020).…”

“…In the same vein, several studies were also carried out related to the cause and effect relationships between EL and organizational innovations in different contexts (Crawford, 2004;Chappell et al, 2019;Gumusluoglu and Ilsev, 2009;Yindong and Xinxin, 2013;Ma et al, 2013;Li, 2013;Crosley, 2014;Raminta, 2014;Al-Husseini, 2014;Pucetaite, 2014;Nunn and Avella, 2015;Mehmood, 2016;Javed et al, 2016). The results of these studies confirmed that EL has a significant positive effect on organizational innovations though they found out different findings regarding with the extent of the relationships between the constructs under study.…”

“…An ethical leader exhibits an array of ethical standards such as integrity, trustworthiness, honesty, altruism and other personal traits as a moral person (Trevino et al, 2000), and followers perceive that these leaders' traits are attractive and credible, which in turn they start to promote such pro-social conduct (Brown et al, 2005). An ethical leader needs to display appropriate and constructive behaviors such as generating novel ideas (Javed et al, 2016), developing or adopting novel reward system, job structure, recruitment system, project evaluation methods and new approaches of strategy (Nunn and Avella, 2015). Accordingly, EL can enable an organization to produce new or improved administrative systems to allocate resources, identify and evaluate opportunities, structure jobs, recruit new employees and other systems (Ryan et al, 2013;Yidong and Xinxin, 2013;Nunn and Avella, 2015).…”

“…An ethical leader needs to display appropriate and constructive behaviors such as generating novel ideas (Javed et al, 2016), developing or adopting novel reward system, job structure, recruitment system, project evaluation methods and new approaches of strategy (Nunn and Avella, 2015). Accordingly, EL can enable an organization to produce new or improved administrative systems to allocate resources, identify and evaluate opportunities, structure jobs, recruit new employees and other systems (Ryan et al, 2013;Yidong and Xinxin, 2013;Nunn and Avella, 2015).…”