Ethics in Higher Education Leadership: Current Themes and Trends

Introduction

Leadership is fundamental to the success of organizations. Leadership is not easy. The great volumes of literature around leadership attest to the difficulties and complexities of leadership. To complicate matters further, the present time, as is often acknowledged in literature, is tumultuous, bordering on chaotic. As Peter Drucker (2012) observes, 21^st century organizations, as a result of globalization and technological revolutions, are on a “threshold of chaos”. If organizations are to persist at this time then there is urgent need for leadership capabilities to support innovation, and agile strategic decision making.

Leadership is inextricably bound to ethics. Most everything a leader does has a moral component – relationships with others, decision-making, exerting influence on followers, etc (Eubanks, Brown, & Ybema, 2012). Leaders, intentionally or unintentionally will engage in unethical as well as ethical behaviours (Eubanks, Brown, & Ybema, 2012), (Eubanks & Mumford, 2010). But there is yet much to learn about how leaders behave and how they construe ethics in relation to behaviour. Thiel, Bagdasarov, Harkrider, Johnson, and Mumford (2012) strongly argue for the need to better understand how leaders construct ethical behaviour, particularly in the context of their organizations and the surrounding complex environment. There is substantial evidence to suggest that ethical leadership is closely linked to positive employee outcomes in terms of well-being and job satisfaction Avey et al. (2012)

It is against the above described background that the issues of ethics in higher education leadership are considered. The enormous challenges faced by higher education at the present time are well-acknowledged in literature (Kisner & Hill, 2011). Higher education institutions are exposed to unprecedent social and economic forces never before experienced. Subjected to these forces, universities are compelled to change; change that is not merely surface but deep-rooted change, which inevitably forces examination of core values and brings to the fore the issue of ethics in higher education leadership.

Mervyn Frost (2016) argues that higher education plays a central ethical role in societies with respect to the advancement of knowledge. The “ethical duty of universities” upholds Frost (2016), “ is to question truth claims, to seek explanations, to find good understandings, and not to propound one or another doctrine without question”. Unethical behaviours in higher education undermine the ethical values that are indispensable to the very reason for the existence of higher education – the pursuit and production of knowledge (Frost, 2016). Furthermore, because the business of higher education is knowledge production, universities exert substantial influence over society at large and therefore the ethical character of universities ultimately influences the ethical character of society at large.