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Journal of Business Ethics (2008) 78:153164 Springer 2007 DOI 10.1007/s10551-006-9320-1
Ethical Stewardship Implications for Leadership and Trust
Cam Caldwell Linda A. Hayes
Ranjan Karri Patricia Bernal
ABSTRACT. Great leaders are ethical stewards who generate high levels of commitment from followers. In this paper, we propose that perceptions about the trustworthiness of leader behaviors enable those leaders to be perceived as ethical stewards. We define ethical stew-ardship as the honoring of duties owed to employees, stakeholders, and society in the pursuit of long-term wealth creation. Our model of relationship between leadership behaviors, perceptions of trustworthiness, and the nature of ethical stewardship reinforces the
importance of ethical governance in dealing with employees and in creating organizational systems that are congruent with espoused organizational values.
KEY WORDS: stewardship, leadership, trust, ethics
From the biting whimsy of Adams (2005) daily Dil-bert cartoons to the wickedly familiar corporate setting of Barrys (2006) Company, the satirical insights of business humorists remind us that those who lead the modern organization need to be laughed at lest we cry in frustration at the seemingly unending examples of mismanagement, ethical misconduct, and patterned dishonesty of a society currently dubbed the cheating culture (Callahan, 2004, p. 1). In contrast to the constant pessimism about what seem to be unending ethical blunders in business ethics, a small but growing group of management scholars have advocated that business leaders can help their companies create long-term wealth (Paine, 2003; Pfeffer, 1998, 2005) and build organizational trust by governing as ethical stewards (Caldwell and Karri, 2005; Pava, 2003). Leaders, these scholars suggest, owe both society and those with whom they work a complex array of normative and instrumental duties that extend the obligations of governance beyond the scope commonly taught in todays numbers-oriented business schools or valued by a Wall Street xated on the illusion of prosperity (Mintzberg, 2004).
In this article we focus on the role of the leader as ethical steward and offer ve propositions about the nature of leadership and trust. Section one of this article briey describes the role of the ethical steward as a normative and instrumental leader. Section two explains how those stewardship roles relate to the
Cam Caldwell is Assistant Professor of Management in the
School of Business at Weber State University....