Ethical Leadership: The Need for a New Approach in Retail

Abstract

The belief that the only goal of organisations now a days is to make profits for its shareholders holds no truth in 21s t Century. There are other and more important considerations to be taken into account. Human Resource management is one of those. Managing employees in the present situation is becoming difficult because of a number of reasons. An employee today is more careerist than his yesteryears counterparts and the resultant intrapersonal conflict leads to ethical dilemmas affecting his performance. This in the present century will involve a different approach and therefore different attributes, knowledge and skills of retail managers. A new leadership style will be required. However, no particular leadership theories and models have been specifically adopted by the retail firms. Scant literature has prompted us to carry out a fundamental study on how leadership styles can be beneficial in addressing ethical concerns at workplace. Accordingly, the focus of this paper is on the characteristics of ethical leadership and how this new leadership style may fit in the needs of successful retail
leaders in the 21st century. A secondary research was carried out to understand the concept of Ethical Leadership and how its implementation has significantly affected different organisations in a positive ways. Characteristics identified by this study relate closely to those of ethical leadership. This paper presents a model in which we have tried to explain how an ethical leader can help sales people deal with situations that are ethically troublesome, consequently, leading to
retention.