Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

Ethics

Ethics distinguish constructive from destructive leaders.⁴² Ethical leaders use position power to serve others whereas unethical ones use power for personal gain and self-promotion.⁴³ Unethical leaders use control and coercion to impose their goals while censuring opposing views. Control can be overt, as when neighborhood watch groups spy on citizens (as in the former East Germany, North Korea, Syria, Iran), or it can be a subtle appeal to follower needs for authority, security, belongingness in a safe community, or fear of isolation, imprisonment, or death. Destructive leaders describe dissidents and rivals in terms designed to devalue and isolate them while promoting in-group solidarity—Hitler's negative portrayals of Jews or Castro's description of dissidents as immoral.⁴⁴ Leaders are typically characterized by a need for power. However, there is an important distinction between socialized and personalized power needs.⁴⁵ Leaders with a socialized need for power are concerned with the group and its priorities; power is used for the common good. Leaders with personalized needs for power use authority for self-promotion; they are usually impulsive, irresponsible, and extraordinarily punitive, to the detriment of their subordinates and organizations.⁴⁶ Destructive leadership outcomes, whether in Stalin's Russia or Ken Lay's Enron, are often associated with leaders with acute personalized needs for power.

LEADERSHIP SPOTLIGHT

Great teams

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