Recognizing and Identifying Ethical Leadership Failures

"Recognizing and Identifying Ethical Leadership Failures" is Week 4's first graded discussion. It sits between Chapter 7 (Ethical Leadership) and Chapter 8 (Organizational Culture) — the forum asks you to diagnose a real leadership failure using the chapters' vocabulary rather than opinion. It is tagged to WLOs 1 and 3 and CLOs 1 and 4, worth 6% of your course grade, due Day 3 for the initial post and Day 7 for peer replies.

This guide restates the prompt requirement by requirement, maps each requirement to specific Chapter 7 and 8 frameworks, walks through sourcing your three required scholarly articles, gives a complete model post with in-text citations and references, and closes with peer-reply expectations and rubric-aligned pitfalls. Read it alongside the two required articles — Henderson (2023) on Merck's ethics officer and Thornton (2014) on preventing ethical leadership failures — before you draft.

The Prompt, Restated

Before beginning this discussion, you are asked to review Chapters 7 and 8 of the textbook and two articles: Henderson's (2023) profile of Merck's chief ethics and compliance officer, and Thornton's (2014) piece on understanding and preventing ethical leadership failures. The initial post itself has three explicit directives.

1. Give an example of one or more leadership failures that you are familiar with — using an organization, group, or political figure of your choosing.
2. Describe the failure(s) in detail.
3. Analyze how the failure(s) could have been mitigated.

A fourth requirement runs underneath all three: support your perspective and approach with three scholarly articles in addition to the course textbook, cited and referenced in APA Style. That is four total sources doing real work in the post — the textbook plus three scholarly articles — not four names dropped in a reference list without matching in-text citations.

The initial post must be a minimum of 350 words. The guided response requires you to review several classmates' posts and reply to at least three of them in a minimum of 150 words each by 11:59 p.m. on Day 7, and each reply should offer an additional solution that could help mitigate the failure the peer described — not just agreement.

Chapter 7 opens with Alcoa, a company with an award-winning ethics program whose Australian division still ran a decades-long bribery scheme funding kickbacks to the Bahraini royal family, resulting in $384 million in fines under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The textbook draws a sharp line from this case: management copes with complexity through planning and budgeting, while leadership inspires and motivates people toward goals (Kotter, 1990, as cited in Gonzalez-Padron, 2025). Alcoa Australia's managers had plenty of management — they lacked ethical leadership. A failure is not simply "something bad happened"; it is a specific breakdown in how leaders modeled, communicated, or enforced ethical conduct.

2.1 Moral Person and Moral Manager (Section 7.2)

The single most useful diagnostic tool in Chapter 7 is Treviño et al.'s (2000) two-dimensional framework. A moral person is honest and trustworthy and makes ethical decisions consistently and fairly. A moral manager inspires ethical behavior in others by setting standards, holding people accountable, and rewarding integrity. Strong in both is an ethical leader; weak in both is, per Archie Carroll (1987), an immoral manager who treats ethics as an obstacle to profit; strong-talk-weak-action is a hypocritical manager; and simply not prioritizing ethics is ethically neutral (Treviño et al., 2000, as cited in Gonzalez-Padron, 2025). Almost any failure can be located on this grid, which satisfies Directive 2 with precision instead of narrative.

2.2 Leadership Styles (Section 7.1)

Section 7.1 contrasts transactional leadership, which relies on monetary or recognition rewards and tends toward compliance rather than genuine ethical modeling, against servant, authentic, and transformational leadership, which share a moral component and focus on employee development (de Klerk & Jooste, 2023, as cited in Gonzalez-Padron, 2025). At Enron, a culture of hitting earnings targets "no matter what" overrode the company's stated values of respect, integrity, communication, and excellence — a useful test for whether your leader relied on reward structures that quietly incentivized rule-bending.

2.3 Eight Characteristics of an Ethical Leader (Table 7.2)

Table 7.2 lists eight characteristics of an ethical leader: personify organizational values, focus on organizational success, understand the values of others, find the best people, create conversations about ethics, create mechanisms of dissent, know the limits of values, and make difficult decisions. A leadership failure can almost always be described as the absence or inversion of one or more of these. Boeing's crisis is an inversion of "know the limits of values": engineers who felt unsafe flying on their own planes were overridden by managers focused on cost savings, so profit values overrode safety values with no acknowledged limit (Gonzalez-Padron, 2025).

2.4 Mechanisms of Dissent and Psychological Safety

Ethical leaders create a culture where employees can object without fear of retaliation, avoiding the traps of obedience to authority, groupthink, and conformity bias. This connects to psychological safety — a shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks and voice concerns without retaliation (Edmondson, 1999, as cited in Gonzalez-Padron, 2025). Wells Fargo is the textbook's example of conformity pressure silencing dissent: employees complied with unrealistic sales targets rather than speak up. Use this vocabulary if your failure involves whistleblowing or retaliation.

2.5 Moral Courage — the Seven Steps (Table 7.3)

Section 7.3 gives you the sharpest tool for the mitigation analysis. Kidder's (2009) three elements of moral courage are a commitment to moral principles, an awareness of the danger involved in supporting them, and a willing endurance of that danger. Table 7.3 breaks this into seven steps: assess the situation, scan for values, act on conscience, understand the risks, endure the hardship, avoid the inhibitors, and learn moral courage. Walking your example through these steps — pinpointing where the leader or the people around them stalled — gives Directive 3 real structure instead of a generic call for "better ethics."

2.6 Accountability and Coaching

Ethical leaders hold themselves accountable by acknowledging and taking responsibility for mistakes, which earns them standing to hold others accountable (Gonzalez-Padron, 2025). Accountability has three components: credibility (following through on commitments), transparency (sharing information openly), and responsibility (accepting consequences) (Ethics & Compliance Initiative, 2024, as cited in Gonzalez-Padron, 2025). GE's "one strike and you're out" policy is the textbook's example of accountability enforced without exception. Coaching is the constructive counterpart: Hicks's (2011) guidance to describe behavior rather than intention, be specific, avoid global labels, and never give feedback while angry is directly usable in a mitigation argument.

Chapter 8 opens with Boeing's 2024 door-panel blowout on an Alaska Airlines flight, tracing it to a culture where senior employees had "little regard for regulators, customers and even co-workers" (Gelles, 2020, as cited in Gonzalez-Padron, 2025). Leadership failures rarely stay contained to one person — they curdle into culture. This gives you a second layer for Directive 3: mitigation isn't only what one leader should have done, it's what cultural mechanism should have caught the failure before it escalated.

3.1 Ethical Culture vs. Ethical Climate (Section 8.1)

Ethical culture denotes the values, norms, and artifacts of an organization; ethical climate refers to employees' shared perceptions of what is ethically appropriate behavior and how to address an ethical issue (Kuntz et al., 2013, as cited in Gonzalez-Padron, 2025). Section 8.1 distinguishes espoused values (what a company says it values) from values taken for granted (the underlying assumptions that actually drive behavior) — Enron's espoused values of respect, integrity, and excellence had nothing to do with the taken-for-granted culture of hitting earnings numbers by any means. Use this distinction whenever your example shows a gap between a stated code of conduct and what people actually did.

3.2 Gebler's Three Elements of an Ethical Culture (Section 8.2)

David Gebler's (2012) integrative model holds that an ethical culture depends on the alignment of vision/mission/goals, principles and beliefs, and standards of behavior. A leadership failure can be diagnosed as a misalignment among these three — Boeing's stated standard was to "make safety our top priority" (Boeing, 2024, as cited in Gonzalez-Padron, 2025), while its actual standards of behavior on the factory floor tolerated skipped quality checks. Naming which element broke down — vision, principles, or enforced standards — gives your mitigation analysis a concrete target.

3.3 Ethisphere's Eight Pillars (Section 8.1)

Ethisphere's (2023b) eight pillars assess the strength of an organization's ethical culture: awareness of the ethics program, perception of the ethics function, observing and reporting misconduct, pressure to compromise standards, organizational justice, supervisor perceptions of ethical leadership, tone from the top, and perceptions of peers and environment. Pick the one or two pillars most clearly absent in your example — commonly "pressure to compromise standards" or "tone from the top" — and argue for the specific fix that would strengthen it.

3.4 The Organizational Ethics Program (Section 8.3)

The Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations (FSGO) list eight elements of an effective ethics program: oversight and management, delegation of substantial authority, standards and procedures, training and communication, monitoring and reporting, disciplinary procedures and incentives, response to critical issues, and periodic risk assessment. Cite this section for a structural mitigation fix — a hotline, an independent ethics officer, mandatory risk reviews. Section 8.3 also introduces the bad apple theory, the idea that misconduct is the fault of one inherently dishonest individual, against the textbook's counterargument that most unethical behavior is supported by the context in which it occurs, through direct reinforcement or benign neglect (Treviño & Brown, 2004, as cited in Gonzalez-Padron, 2025). Rejecting the bad apple theory lets you argue the real fix is systemic, not personnel-only.

The prompt explicitly allows an organization, a group, or a political figure — you are not limited to corporate scandals. The textbook itself gives you several fully documented, citable examples: Alcoa's Bahrain bribery scheme (Chapter 7 introduction), Enron's collapse (Chapters 7 and 8), Boeing's 2024 safety failures (Chapter 8 introduction), Wells Fargo's sales-pressure culture (section 7.2), or individual executives named in section 7.2 — American Apparel's Dov Charney, Best Buy's Brian Dunn, HealthSouth's Richard Scrushy, or Slync's Chris Kirchner.

Three hundred fifty words gives you room to satisfy all three directives with real depth, provided you budget the space deliberately rather than spending most of it retelling the scandal.

• Paragraph 1 — The example (Directive 1), ~60–80 words. Name the leader, organization, or group and state what the failure was, with a citation establishing the facts.
• Paragraph 2 — The failure in detail (Directive 2), ~120–150 words. Walk through what happened and who was affected, and name which Chapter 7 or 8 framework it represents (moral manager vs. moral person, an absent Table 7.2 characteristic, a misaligned Gebler element). Most of your citations should land here.
• Paragraph 3 — Mitigation analysis (Directive 3), ~100–130 words. Propose specific, named interventions — a mechanism of dissent, a skipped moral-courage step, a missing FSGO element — rather than a generic call for "better ethics."
• References. The textbook plus your three scholarly articles, in APA Style — does not count toward the 350-word minimum.

Mechanics That Protect the Grade

• 350 words is a floor. A post satisfying all three directives with framework-level analysis typically runs closer to 400–500 words.
• Four sources doing real work — the textbook plus three scholarly articles, each cited where actually used, not clustered in one closing sentence.
• APA in-text citations and a matching references list; use the APA resources linked in the prompt if you need a refresher.
• Separate the three directives visibly so a grader can find your example, description, and mitigation analysis without re-reading the whole post.

The post below is a model, not a submission. It demonstrates how to satisfy all three directives using the Enron case already discussed in Chapters 7 and 8, with in-text APA citations and a matching reference list. Do not copy it — choose your own example (or use Enron but write your own independent analysis in your own words), because submitting this model verbatim is an academic-integrity violation.

References

• Gonzalez-Padron, T. (2025). Business ethics and social responsibility for managers (2nd ed.). The University of Arizona Global Campus.
• Thornton, L. F. (2014, January 15). Understanding (and preventing) ethical leadership failures. Leading in Context. https://leadingincontext.com/2014/01/15/understanding-and-preventing-ethical-leadership-failures/
• Henderson, L. (2023, September). A new era of ethical leadership: Lisa LeCointe-Cephas, SVP, chief ethics and compliance officer and office of general counsel, human health, Merck, uses her unique style of leadership--stop, drop, and roll--while elevating voices that need to be heard. Pharmaceutical Executive, 43(9), 14+.
• [Add a third independently researched scholarly source if your own topic requires it beyond the two articles assigned this week.]

Body of post: approximately 400 words (excludes reference list) — above the 350-word minimum, with all three directives addressed and four sources cited in text. Replace the Enron example with your own chosen leadership failure before submitting, and cite your own three scholarly articles.

The guided response requires you to review several classmates' posts and reply to at least three of them (or the instructor), each reply a minimum of 150 words, by 11:59 p.m. on Day 7. The instructions are specific about what a reply must contain: an additional solution that could help mitigate the failure the peer described.

A Four-Step Reply That Earns the Points

• Acknowledge the specific failure your peer analyzed and the core breakdown they identified, so the reply reads as engaged rather than generic.
• Bring a different Chapter 7 or 8 concept to the table — if your peer used the moral person/moral manager grid, add Gebler's elements or the Ethisphere pillars.
• Propose a genuinely additional mitigation the prompt asks for — a mechanism of dissent, an FSGO element, a moral-courage step, or a coaching intervention your peer did not already cover.
• Support the addition with a citation where possible, and close with a genuine question rather than a compliment.

• Skipping the mitigation analysis — a post that describes a failure vividly but never analyzes how it could have been mitigated is only two-thirds done.
• Fewer than three scholarly articles plus the textbook — the prompt is explicit about four total sources doing real work.
• General news citations standing in for scholarly sources — verify each of your three is peer-reviewed or from a credible academic/trade database.
• Vague description with no named framework — "the leaders acted unethically" is a summary, not an analysis. Name the specific Chapter 7 or 8 concept the failure represents.
• Treating the failure as one bad apple — section 8.3's rebuttal rewards analysis that considers systemic and cultural contributors, not just one person's ethics.
• Replies that only agree or compliment — the guided response requires an additional mitigation solution, not agreement.
• Missing the 150-word floor on any reply, or replying to fewer than three peers.