Week 4 Overview — Ethical Leadership and Organizational Culture

Week 4 turns from the mechanics of ethical decision-making toward the people and systems that make ethical behavior routine — or make it disappear. Chapter 7 asks what an ethical leader actually does day to day: which behaviors build trust, and why followers stop speaking up when a leader stops listening. Chapter 8 zooms out from the individual leader to the organization around them, asking how values, norms, and formal programs combine into something durable enough to be called a culture.

The two deliverables mirror that structure. The discussion forum asks you to diagnose a real leadership failure and explain how it could have been prevented. The assignment asks you to step into a manager's shoes and design a fix for a culture already producing bad decisions. Read together, the week asks one question: when ethics breaks down, was it the leader, the culture, or both — and what actually repairs it?

Overview Table of Deliverables

The table below reproduces the Week 4 Overview page's deliverable table. Two assessments carry weight this week, totaling 17% of the course grade — nearly a fifth of the final grade rides on getting these two right.

The Canvas Overview page lists five Weekly Learning Outcomes (WLOs) this week — reproduced verbatim below, each followed by a note on what it actually requires of you and where in the week it is assessed.

Read the five outcomes as one arc: WLOs 1 through 3 live inside Chapter 7 and the discussion forum, about a single leader's behavior and its consequences. WLOs 4 and 5 live inside Chapter 8 and the assignment, about the organizational system that reinforces or undercuts that leader.

The required text remains Gonzalez-Padron, T. (2025). Business Ethics and Social Responsibility for Managers (2nd ed.). The University of Arizona Global Campus, available through the Constellation reader. Week 4 assigns two chapters.

For a full walk-through of each chapter's frameworks, key terms, and closing questions, see the dedicated Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 deep-dive study guides on this site.

Assigned Articles

Beyond the two chapters, the Resources page names five articles and one webpage anchoring the week's discussion and assignment work.

• Bazerman, M. H. (2020). A new model for ethical leadership. Harvard Business Review, 98(5), 90–97. Argues organizations should focus on creating broader societal value rather than relying on simple rules; assists the assignment.
• Henderson, L. (2023, September). A new era of ethical leadership: Lisa LeCointe-Cephas, SVP, chief ethics and compliance officer, Merck. Pharmaceutical Executive, 43(9), 14+. Describes how AI and emerging technologies create new ethical dilemmas for compliance professionals; assists the discussion forum.
• Kouchaki, M., & Smith, I. (2022, January 5). 5 research-backed strategies for building an ethical culture at work. Kellogg Insight. Argues workplaces should be sites of ongoing, structured ethical learning; assists the assignment.
• Smith, I. H., Kouchaki, M., & Cowan, J. (2021). Building an ethical company. Harvard Business Review, 99(6), 132–139. Describes how employers foster an environment that helps employees become more ethical over time; assists the assignment.
• Thornton, L. F. (2014, January 15). Understanding (and preventing) ethical leadership failures. Leading in Context. Describes the proactive habits that prevent leadership failures before they happen; assists the discussion forum.
• Indeed for Employers. (n.d.). Building an ethical workplace. Explains why an ethical workplace benefits employees, employers, and the business as a whole; assists the assignment.

Chapter 7 opens with Alcoa — a company with an award-winning ethics program that nonetheless ran a decades-long bribery scheme in Australia, because management (coping with complexity through planning and budgeting) is not the same thing as leadership (inspiring people toward shared values). The chapter distinguishes ethical leadership styles — servant, authentic, and transformational, all of which empower employees toward shared values — from transactional leadership, which merely trades rewards for compliance.

The chapter's core framework is a set of eight characteristics shared by ethical leaders: personifying organizational values, focusing on organizational success over self-interest, understanding the values of others, finding the best people, creating conversations about ethics, creating mechanisms of dissent, knowing the limits of values, framing actions in ethical terms, and making difficult decisions. It also introduces the moral person / moral manager distinction — a leader can be personally honest without ever holding others accountable, and true ethical leadership requires both.

Chapter 8 opens with Boeing — engineers who felt their own aircraft were unsafe, managers proud of talking regulators out of pilot training, and one employee who wrote, "I honestly don't trust many people at Boeing." The chapter's core claim: culture, not a poster on the wall, drives behavior. Shared values, norms, and artifacts combine into either a healthy culture where employees speak up, or a dysfunctional one where misconduct hides in plain sight.

The chapter builds two frameworks for the assignment. First, three elements of an ethical culture — vision/mission/goals, principles and beliefs, and standards of behavior — that must align for a culture to be genuinely ethical rather than performatively ethical. Second, an eight-element organizational ethics program drawn from the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations: program oversight, vetting substantial authority, standards and procedures, training and communication, monitoring and reporting, disciplinary procedures and incentives, response to critical issues, and periodic risk assessment.

Tagged to WLOs 1 and 3 and CLOs 1 and 4, worth 6%, due Day 3. Before posting, review Chapters 7 and 8 along with the Henderson and Thornton articles.

The initial post gives an example of one or more leadership failures — from an organization, a group, or a political figure — describes the failure in detail, and analyzes how it could have been mitigated. The prompt requires support from three scholarly articles beyond the course text, cited in APA Style. The post runs a minimum of 350 words, due Day 3. Guided response requires replying to at least three classmates in a minimum of 150 words each by Day 7, each offering an additional mitigation solution.

Tagged to WLOs 2, 4, and 5 and CLOs 3, 4, and 5, worth 11%, due Day 7. Before writing, review Chapters 7 and 8, the Bazerman, Smith/Kouchaki/Cowan, and Kouchaki/Smith articles, and the Indeed webpage.

The assignment casts you as a midlevel manager who has noticed the organizational culture contributing to unethical decision-making by subordinates and peers. The paper must list ethical concerns observed in organizations you have worked in or seen, identify opportunities for leadership to provide solutions, and propose consulting advice for those leaders.

Format requirements: 4 to 5 double-spaced pages, not including title and references pages, in APA Style. A separate title page (bold title in title case, student name, institution, course name and number, instructor's name, due date), an introduction ending in a clear thesis statement, a conclusion, academic voice throughout, at least 3 scholarly sources beyond the course text, in-text citations, and a separate APA references page.

Chapter 7 establishes that a leader's individual behavior sets the tone employees follow. Chapter 8 shows that tone alone is not enough: it has to be embedded in vision, principles, and standards, and reinforced by a formal ethics program, or it evaporates once leadership looks away. Both chapters use Boeing to make the point from opposite angles — individual ethical lapses (Chapter 7) metastasized into a systemic cultural failure (Chapter 8). This is the move the assignment rewards: show how a leadership failure got baked into an organization's norms until it became routine.

The discussion forum's Day 3 deadline means Chapter 7 and its two named articles need to be read early in the week — there is no room to push discussion prep to the weekend if you also want three peer replies done thoughtfully by Day 7.

1. Day 1–2: Read Chapter 7, then the Henderson and Thornton articles named in the discussion prompt. Identify your leadership-failure example and locate two more scholarly sources to reach the required three.
2. Day 2–3: Draft and post the discussion forum's initial post (350+ words), citing all three articles plus the textbook in APA Style. Post by Day 3.
3. Day 3–4: Read Chapter 8, then the Bazerman, Smith/Kouchaki/Cowan, and Kouchaki/Smith articles and the Indeed webpage, with the assignment prompt in mind.
4. Day 4–5: Outline the paper around its three required sections — concerns observed, leadership opportunities, consulting advice — and draft the introduction with its required thesis statement.
5. Day 5–6: Write the full 4-to-5 page draft, locate the three required scholarly sources, and format the title page and references page in APA Style.
6. Day 6–7: Post three peer replies (150+ words each, each offering an additional mitigation idea), then do a final APA and proofreading pass on the assignment before the Day 7 deadline.

OMM 640 has been building outward: earlier weeks established what ethics means in a business context and how organizations build formal compliance structures. Week 4 narrows the lens onto the two forces that determine whether those structures actually work — the people leading and the culture surrounding them. It is the hinge week where the course shifts from describing ethical frameworks in the abstract to diagnosing why real organizations fail to live up to them. The vocabulary here — moral person versus moral manager, the eight characteristics of ethical leaders, the three elements of an ethical culture — recurs whenever later weeks discuss scandals, stakeholder trust, or organizational change.