Leadership in Management: Investigating the Impact of Strong Leadership and Ethical Commitment within Business.
The current business environment creates challenges for leaders in respect to a lack of leadership and a lack of business ethics. The situation created through these conditions is grim: A lack of leadership can negatively impact a company in terms of its performance and profitability, while a company that addresses problems in leadership tends to find not only flaws in management strategies but also finds areas of the company that also need to be addressed. The case study of IBM, a Fortune 500 company that faced potential bankruptcy in the early 1990s, demonstrates the impact that a strong, centralized leader has on a company in the form of Lou Gerstner. The example of IBM demonstrates that creating conditions in which management is able to recognize problems in not only their leadership but within the overall structure of the company itself helps to resolve these problems effectively. In addition, addressing the role that leadership and ethics have on a company's performance helps to determine the need to create a powerful ethical presence. Managers find that they must take steps to ensure ethical conduct in order to preserve customers and to improve employee involvement. This is especially true in the wake of the scandal at Enron which served to demolish consumer faith in business ethics.
