What is Ethical Leadership?

Without the idealistic or philosophical jargon...

Academia’s most common definition of ethical leadership isn’t the most informative:

Demonstrating normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making,” (Brown et al., 2005, p. 120).

Once you parse through it, the definition essentially says that ethical leadership means behaving in a way that aligns with accepted norms and promoting those norms. But what about standing up against what is a current norm or going against the normalizing of unethical behavior?

This definition is frequently referenced—so often, that its continued citation reinforces its status as the "most cited" definition. Despite its prominence, this definition lacks practical guidance for real-world leaders facing complex ethical dilemmas.

Ethical Leadership Goes Beyond Following Norms

The truth is, ethical leadership is about questioning, refining, and sometimes challenging standards or the strategy. Leaders inevitably find themselves in situations where the direction of norms of their group or industry are inadequate or even harmful. Ethical leadership requires the courage to question and elevate those norms rather than simply reinforcing them.

What Does Research Say?

At its core, ethical leadership blends fairness, transparency, and accountability. It also includes explaining decisions, inviting dialogue about them, and sharing decision-making power with others (De Hoogh & Den Hartog, 2008). Researchers have identified key dimensions of ethical leadership:

• Fairness and integrity – The foundation of ethical leadership

• Ethical guidance – Providing moral clarity and leading by example

• People orientation – Genuinely caring for and prioritizing others

• Power sharing – Encouraging collaboration and input

• Role clarification – Setting clear expectations and standards (Yukl et al., 2013)

But ethical leadership isn’t just about being nice to others—it also requires backbone. Particularly in public organizations, ethical leaders must actively recognize those who uphold ethical standards and hold accountable those who fall short (Downe et al., 2016).

How did CIA Officers Describe Ethical Leadership?

It’s doing the right thing and kind of going against the grain sometimes. It’s the idea of just taking ownership of everything you do, your successes and your failures. That was always really important for me…and to follow all the things I'm talking about.

Ethical leadership to CIA officers started with ownership and accountability. To summarize another officer, being accountable as an ethical leader meant to take on the challenges being a leader poses. It required shifting from solely being a technically focused employee to identifying oneself as a leader. Essentially, being accountable to the leader identity. You were no longer only responsible for yourself, but for getting feedback and helping to create productivity and harmony among your team:

Yeah, you’ve got to get the job done, it's always a mission, mission, mission, but you can't do the job by yourself. If people are productive and they feel good about it, they're motivated, they have harmony, then you're going to succeed.

After self-accountability, an ethical leader was accountable for facilitating hard work and connection among teammates. This was important to uphold in the CIA because even the best officers could not do everything by themselves, even if they thought they could.

Ethics had to be practiced all the time. My boss would talk about that. What I learned from him was not only modeling ethical behavior, but talking about it, almost so much that people got annoyed.

Every month, he would hold an all hands meeting and he would repeat his expectations for everybody. One of them was personal conduct and doing the right thing. I'm not sure he ever used the specific word ‘ethics,’ but it was understood.

Ethical leadership to this officer wasn’t just about doing the right thing, or even saying the right thing—it was about making ethical expectations a constant part of the conversation. As the officer described, ethical leadership meant reinforcing high standards so frequently that they became mentally ingrained among the team. This officer explained how his boss took the time to describe the intention to him:

My boss says to me, if you're repeating messages so often that people get annoyed, you know it's sinking in. Then, if you were to go and ask them later, what are the things that the boss thinks about? They're naturally gonna say, ‘Well, every month he always tells us these things about being respectful to the people on your right and your left, being honest, and if something goes badly, you come tell us.’

By consistently communicating expectations, his boss ensured that ethical behavior wasn’t just assumed—it was actively reinforced, leaving little room for ambiguity about what was expected.

The second layer lesson is how the boss mentored this officer. The boss not only communicated his standards to the team, but gave this more senior officer the wisdom behind his ways. That way, this officer could consider carrying forward the ethical communication practice into his own leadership.

The Business Case for Ethical Leadership

Research shows that ethical leadership has tangible benefits. It fosters optimism across organizations (De Hoogh & Den Hartog, 2008), strengthens team cohesion (Zheng et al., 2015), increases organizational commitment (Hassan et al., 2014), and creates a shared sense of identity and purpose (O'Keefe et al., 2019). All of these conditions support focus and productivity.

On the flip side, when leaders fail to model ethical behavior, the consequences are severe. Employees disengage, creativity declines, and problem-solving stalls. Over time, teams that lack ethical leadership withdraw from meaningful engagement altogether (Boudrias et al., 2021).

How Do We Get There?

Based on my research, becoming an ethical leader starts with self-examination in three key areas. Diving deeper and reexamining each concept as you move up the ranks:

1. Accountability – Holding yourself and others to ethical standards, setting the ethical norms throughout your level of influence.

2. Self-Development – Continuously refining your ethical awareness, your values, influences, and building the humility and/or backbone required to be an ethical leader.

3. Communication – Fostering ethical dialogue, lessons learned, listening, preparing for hard conversations, and balancing humility with accountability in words.

Organizations can also engage in this reflection at a macro level. By examining these three areas, top leaders can identify where their organization needs attention to become an environment that fosters ethical leadership—one where ethical behavior is encouraged and actively reinforced.

Example macro analysis might include: Is the organization holding itself accountable to address unethical processes or instances? How has society requested or demanded the organization’s accountability and what has been the organizational response? How has the organization learned and adapted? Is it a role model for other organizations in terms of ethics, or are there others who might serve as a better model? How does the organization communicate hard topics, both internally and externally? Does it listen, internally and externally?

In Closing

Ethical leadership is a discipline, a practice, and a responsibility. It requires personal integrity, plus a commitment to continuous examination and actions in the areas of accountability, self-development, and communication.

In terms of accountability, ethical leadership involves taking ownership of every decision, success, and failure. It means recognizing that leadership is an identity, not just a function. Ethical leaders hold themselves and others to a high standard.

To support communication, ethical leadership requires making ethical expectations a regular part of the conversation. One officer recalled how his boss reinforced these values so often that people found it repetitive, but that repetition was the point. By clearly and consistently communicating expectations, leaders ensure that ethical behavior is understood, reinforced, and ingrained in the team’s culture.

In paying attention to self-development, an ethical leader continuously refines their judgment, learning from experience, and handling each dilemma with greater awareness and integrity than before.

Ethical leadership is about finding and setting a standard, reinforcing it through action and dialogue, and creating an environment where ethics aren’t just practiced but embedded in the way a team operates.

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