Since time immemorial, the phenomenon of leadership and its understanding has attracted the attention of the business world because of its important role in human groups. Nevertheless, for years efforts to understand this concept have only been centred on people in leadership roles, thus overlooking an important aspect in its understanding: the necessary moral dimension which is implicit in the relationship between leader and follower. As an illustrative example of the importance of considering good morality in leadership, an empirical study (...) is conducted in which a good performance of the "leader-follower" relationship is reflected when individuals perceive ethical leadership in higher hierarchical managerial levels. To be precise, findings of this study demonstrate that follower job response is improved through an ethics trickle-down partial effect from the Top Manager to the immediate supervisor, and also reveal both key aspects and managerial level on which the practice of ethical leadership should rest upon to have a stronger effect on the follower positive job response. Practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are finally presented. (shrink)

This paper argues for an Aristotelian account of good leader as ethical and effective by outlining the ethical motivation and the constraints that moral luck imposes on effectiveness. This account of a good leader, which is grounded on practical wisdom, is assessed against the contemporary leadership debate by addressing the tension between the ethical and the effective and by contrasting the Aristotelian virtuous leader against the dominant contemporary types of leadership. My Aristotelian proposal of a virtuous leader relies on an (...) isomorphic relation between the ethical and political domains by proposing that as virtue is to vices rooted in calculation and desires, so the virtuous leader is to the calculative bureaucrat and the emotionally obsessed tyrant. (shrink)