Public Leadership Ethics

A Management Approach

J. Patrick Dobel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351049320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Designed to help midlevel and senior managers in organizations dedicated to public purposes, this book provides trained self-awareness to deploy values to guide decisions and build the culture of their organizations. The book explores how all managing involves leading and identifies the levels of ethical responsibility for managerial leaders.

Highlighting the fundamental role that ethics plays in organizational life, J. Patrick Dobel uses insights from cognitive and social psychology to discuss how to anticipate and address threats to integrity and value informed decision making. Building on traditional ethical theory and modern research, the book begins with the fundamental assumption that individuals possess responsibility when they act for ethical purposes and results in taking a position within a public or nonprofit organization. This assumption of responsibility recognizes the inherent discretion in all positions and claims that effective ethical management requires self-awareness, self-mastery, integrity and a working frame of one's values and character. The book pays special attention to the challenges of integrating diverse people and perspectives in public organizations as well as attending to the slippages to integrity in organizational life and how managers and leaders can foresee and address ethical slippage and corruption. The book provides checklists and decision frameworks that individuals can adopt and deploy to guide decisions.

Public Leadership Ethics: A Management Approach will help create strong value informed cultures supported by communication, transparency, incentives and strong management cadres to achieve high quality service and integrity based actions. It will be of special interest to managerial leaders in public service and teaching in public administration and policy programs or executive training.

1
The Purposes of Ethics in Organizations

Organizations are designed to achieve results. These results implicate ethical consequences for both people inside and outside of organizations. Organizations with public purposes often are stewards of complex and necessary public functions and do not generate clear outcomes such as profit and loss. They serve long-term purposes and address issues that the private sector finds uninviting unless specific policy measures are taken. Public purposes and missions deepen the moral consequences of public purpose organizations and create high obligations to ensure competent, fair and effective results.

Strong and successful organizations build powerful cultures. The cultures of organizations carry the values that shape and justify the mission. The values are the carriers of ethical norms and character that suffuse the daily life of the organization. Cultures become more vital when public purposes are served since the organization cannot rely simply upon self-interest to motivate and achieve results.

The norms and character shaped by a culture support individuals and groups as they seek to achieve committed purposes against the predictable temptations of agents serving their own interests, subcultures pursuing their own interests or outside groups seeking to capture the public organization for their own purposes. The culture, if well designed and led, promulgates, socializes and imbeds the public purpose and commitment in the personnel pursuing public purpose results.

When these values and character attributes support strong cognitive frameworks that are internalized by personnel, culture becomes operationalized ethics for the people. Because organizations depend upon thousands of decisions made daily by many individuals in pursuit of common goals, having people share a commitment to shared values and aspire to ideals of character provides a strong foundation to support the daily decisions and actions of individuals. If supported by strong managerial leadership and well-designed incentives and structures, ethics becomes a fundamental resource of strong organizations and an obligation of good leaders and managers.

The Roles of Ethics in Institutions

• Anchors Integrity
• Focuses Discretion
• Identify and Address High Stakes
• Guards Institutional Legitimacy
• Carries Organizational Culture
• Informs Diversity and Respect

Anchors Integrity

Individual values and character ground decisions and express who people are. They are the means by which individual integrity aligns with an organization’s mission. Values and character focus and guide decisions but also pervade and sustain the professional norms and values of the institution. Acting upon ethical values gives daily reality to the organization’s vision and mission. Values and characters serve as the buttresses for the self-narration individuals develop to forge an identity. They are critical to asserting an ideal self, which becomes the internal reference for an individual’s internal dialogue over correct decisions and sustained actions. These values become the self-reflective notation for selves as individuals navigate the challenges and tensions of keeping integrity in the face of endless tensions, compromises and decisions in organizational life. They become even more vital in assessing the consequences of action and asking whether the results actually comport with the valued purposes.

As the values and character are internalized by individuals, they buttress people against the standard and predictable pull of self-interested agents using the organization for their own purposes. This can include avoiding being accountable for mandated results and subverting accountability, as well as distorting performance for their own ends. These patterns exist in all organizations and require constant attention, oversight, accountability and alignment, where possible, with interests of personnel and above all institutional support for sustained professional integrity of the actors as they face these standard inclinations.

Ethics matters for persons and organizations because ethics both anchors and expresses integrity. People balance complicated lives and many duties and define selfhood by judgments and actions. Often people only learn what kind of human beings they are by deciding and acting in important situations. To do this well and sustain self-respect, individuals rely upon values and virtues to guide decisions and uphold selfhood in the long haul of work and life. Values and characters serve as major themes in the autobiographical narratives people construct to give coherence and worth to lives. These themes of personal identity and integrity enable individuals to direct actions in order to keep consistently to a sense of self.

Focuses the Use of Discretion

Ethics plays a critical role in public and nonprofit organizations because of its centrality to discretion. Discretion is fundamental to the act of managing and leading and means that individuals have a choice in responding to situations. Discretion pervades organizational life. Within the space of discretion lies the bias toward self-interested, self-protective or convenient actions. Ethics along with institutional design and oversight is one of the bulwarks to shore up discretion’s connection with decisions consistent with the mission.

Senior leaders possess it as they work to set general direction and manage complex political and authorizing environments. Senior leaders must constantly make value driven decisions about priorities and directions for action. It comes into play at the middle and supervisory levels when rules fail to cover a situation, or several rules conflict, or acting upon seemingly clear rules would create significant harm. Every midlevel manager and line worker regularly face decisions about whether to attend to a problem, how to define the problem and decide upon actions from enforcement to guidance to reminding people. It comes to bear when new situations or surprises arise for which people have no agreed upon standard responses. In a diffuse power and shared governance world, leaders, managers and line personnel possess even more discretion as they must navigate the tensions of shared jurisdictions and incomplete accountability lines as well as gain cooperation and collaboration from partners and competitors in performing their obligations.

Identifies and Addresses High Stakes

Public and nonprofit organizations carry high responsibility for many major concerns from public safety to education to medical or homeless support to food or water security. They often serve future generations, vulnerable individuals or a common good that others may not devote time and attention toward such as safe food or water. Many decisions involve high stakes for the people dependent upon such agencies. The impact of these consequences upon the welfare of citizens and clients entails serious ethical stakes in many organizational decisions. Being clear about the ethical results of actions keeps people alert and aware of the serious nature of the jobs they pursue.

Day to day life can grind away at a sense of purpose or nobility of public or nonprofit public service. People grow tired and can forget not just the vital importance of the grant of responsibility of an organization but of how people rely upon the high-quality performance of their professional actions. Even when the organization or people forget or hide the true stakes of actions, personal decisions impact real people, the organization’s culture and the welfare of citizens. Very often workers do not even see the impact of actions since they may serve in functional positions such as finance or human resources that support line operations. People may work on obscure or hidden obligations such as sewer inspectors, ensuring sanitary hospitals or water treatment that people do not see and take for granted.

These are the classic institutions whose success is unseen by people and underappreciated by the public, but the impacts of negligence are severe. In addition, normal psychological heuristics and tendencies to protect one’s self-identity can encourage people to live in denial about the real impact of incompetent or lazy actions. Good managerial leaders keep the ethical norms and importance of actions alive in the minds of staff and personnel and manage in a way that models and reinforces high quality and consistent work commitment to performing even the hidden but vital ethical actions.

The legitimacy or economic well-being of a public purpose institution is won or lost by the daily unfolding competence and relational dynamics of people doing their jobs. Public welfare and services are built up by day-by-day actions structured and guided by managerial leaders. The quality of service is, in turn, influenced by leadership of managers and the quality of relations and beliefs among the workers doing the jobs. How individuals lead reacts back upon both the quality of internal relations as well as the quality of external impact and relations.

This reality means that public and nonprofit institutions are deeply vulnerable to ethical collapse and scandal. Their failures ripple out as lost legitimacy, which has ruinous consequences for government and nonprofits. More than one hopes for but less often than it seems in the media, public organizations collapse or get into serious ethical lapses due to thoughtless accretion of unexamined unethical actions. These actions harden as unseen but slowly impacting patterns that lead to disillusioned citizens or clients or disheartened coworkers who see corrupt or unethical patterns flourish unchecked.

The contagion effect of single actions over time can infect large portions of an institution or be segregated into certain areas. When this happens, competence is sacrificed. People underperform, and less service is provided for the resources expended. The lower quality or levels of service lead to accumulating social and economic deficits in the served areas. The values everyone wants to believe in get sacrificed for personal or institutional convenience, gain or to cover up a mistake.

This point of mission collapse can be hidden for a long time, and this aggravates the decline of the culture and increases the number of individuals who are involved either as participants or who collude by looking the other way. When the tipping point is reached or the corruption leaks into the media, this type of collapse both undermines the legitimacy of the public and nonprofit sectors, and it hurts the present and future citizens who depend on strong regulation and honest, competent service.

Any organization in the public eye can be a flash point for media coverage and scandals. These media frenzies destroy careers, undermine a program for years and hurt the legitimacy of the program, institution and sector. This reality imposes special obligations upon managerial leaders to examine their organizational worlds to anticipate and address failures of ethical performance before they reach the turning points. Attention to ethics and mission can cut through the bureaucratic self-interest and rationalizations to get to the core values and core issues that can be lost in the fog of daily turf battles and political friction.

Guards Institutional Legitimacy

Organizational legitimacy and trust remain fundamental attributes of any successful public organization, and ethics is central to maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of the general public. All over the world, public institutions are struggling to earn the trust and respect of the general public. In addition, nonprofit institutions depend upon their legitimacy as their main form of social capital. Trust enables a nonprofit to raise funds and be chosen over other competing good causes. Trust and legitimacy can minimize resistance to organizational decisions and lead to less enforcement and higher efficacy. Lawsuits, scandals, public failures and media frenzies all erode the legitimacy and trust people have for government or nonprofit organizations.

Decreased legitimacy increases evasion of the law, increases levels of illegal activity, increases resistance to enforcement and decreases normal compliance and even commitment to public-spirited laws and regulations. Decreased trust and respect for government hurts the ability to recruit people, raise funds or pursue organizational missions without excessive legal regulation. Lack of trust in public organizations increases resistance to taxes as well as compliance with laws. At the same time, decreased trust and respect warrant the public and clients to distrust public officials more and treat personnel with less respect, leading to a vicious cycle of public disdain engendering less respect and service from beleaguered officials.

Senior leaders need to make building legitimacy and trust for public institutions a fundamental part of their ethical leadership principles. Establishing legitimacy for the institution and projects emerges as vital in the world of governance and collaboration, where it becomes a continuous responsibility to shore up common purpose and demand mutual accountability across institutions. The legitimacy of the project depends not just upon public perceptions and results but also upon the shared commitment of the collaborators. It involves intense attention to financial stewardship, competence and efficiency to reassure people that money is well spent for authorized purposes. Managers and supervisors embody the values and mission and hold the legitimacy of government and nonprofit institutions in their hands as the front-line agents of leading and management. They are the point of interaction where almost all the good is accomplished but where slippage can generate the greatest harm.

Carries Organizational Culture

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