A Kaleidoscopic Approach to Teaching Ethical Dimensions of Leadership

The Course

Ethical Dimensions of Leadership is an advanced level elective. Students involved in the course have met prerequisites in the foundations of management course and have completed a required core course on Value Based Leadership. Three assumptions underline the construct of the course.

• 1.

  Ethics is about good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice, in individuals and in our relationship with people and all sentient beings.

• 2.

  Leadership is a subset of Ethics rather than Ethics being a subset of Leadership.

• 3.

  “By their acts you shall know them.” Consideration is given to a variety of media, including assigned readings, cases, videos, and personal vignettes to integrate the learning of ethical leadership.

The purpose of this course is to understand the moral responsibilities of leadership and followership in a variety of views. The course has the following objectives:

• •

  To analyze the moral obligations of leadership and followership in context.

• •

  To learn how leaders and followers shape the moral environment.

• •

  To broaden students’ moral perspective and develop moral imagination.

• •

  To develop students’ ability to present and critique moral arguments.

• •

  To practice ethical problem solving.

• •

  To reflect on the moral perils of power on leadership and followership.

The course is taught as an interactive seminar in which the professor actively participates in the course discussion, but is not the locus of facilitation. Rather, the students share the responsibility for facilitating the class discussion by providing summaries of the readings and preparing high quality discussion points in the form of questions and observations. Past experiences are shared in the storytelling, the role-playing, and the experiential exercises.

At the beginning of the course a student-led “conduct of the class” enumerates principles that include the following: