The Importance Of Unethical Leadership

Ethical leadership has been empirically proven to affect employee job performance (Brown et al.,

2005; Piccolo et al., 2010, Zhu et al. 2015). Top management teams and policy makers must carefully recruit people in high positions in organizations. Poor employee performance does not necessarily mean that they are insufficiently qualified to achieve organizations goals and objectives; a critical reason for ineffective workforce performance can be the leader itself.

Higher education institutions play a vital role in improving the country economically and culturally because they provide society with graduates to engage in different organizations nationwide. Ethical leadership is the most effective leadership style for higher education institutions

(2012:p6), unethical supervision is defined as

“supervisory behaviors that violate normative standards.” Unethical leadership refers to dishonesty and unfairness, engagement in corruption and other criminal behaviors, low empathy, lack of responsibility, following egocentric pursuits of one’s own interest, and manipulation and misuse of others (Eisenberg

& Brodbeck, 2014:350). Unethical leadership is a process of intentional or unintentional, passive or active, and recurrent influence that harms others, whether individuals, organizations, and/or society as a whole. Unethical leadership consists of both violations of legislative rules and ethical principles, and both of these aspects of unethical leadership are often practically inseparable (Lašáková & Remišová,

2015).

Illustrating the taxonomy of manifestations of unethical leadership is essential in analyzing an ethical dilemma in the workplace, as follows:

a) A bad leader is characterized as an immoral person and cannot serve as a role model