Beyond the Rulebook: Unpacking Max H. Bazerman’s Ethical Leadership Model from Harvard Business Review

By Mark Ellis, Ph.D.

A New Model for Ethical Leadership

Bazerman’s model creates a lot of subtleties that I think makes good sense.  The first of these is moving away from trying to comply with ethical rules to trying to maximize the good in society.  This moves ethics out of the realm of a binary do this or don’t do this, and in to the realm of being a simple decision calculation – you sum all of the positive and negative utility for all potential courses of action and choose the one with the highest value.

First and foremost then, his model makes sense to me. An example that shows how the model works and its advantages is applied to autonomous vehicles. In this example Bazerman is clever and uses it to demonstrate how less practical frameworks such as consequentialism do not handle emerging technology moral dilemmas very well. This in turn shows how important it is to bring practicality back into our ethical theories, as with rapid technological advance we even need to rapidly evolve our ethical paradigms.

Bazerman also gives ‘bounded ethicality’ a mention, which means he looks at the cognitive limitations that stop people from choosing what he calls the ‘right’ course of action. By considering these constraints, it becomes more evident what business leaders should do and what they should avoid, in other words, he teaches how business leaders could know more ethics in certain situations and teaches he how to use the veil of ignorance and comparative decision-making.

Counter Arguments and Limitation

Although this model has several strengths, there are a few arguments to be made about it. The most central one is the conflict that has always exists in utilitarianism with the line between the greatest good for the greatest number and the preservation of individual rights and justice. With regards to the ethical programming of the vehicles that he discusses, this issue becomes even more important because here we have a clear tension between the very utilitarian idea of the greatest good for the greatest number with the greater good of the populous of these cars, while also considering the good, but less than right (or population level) number of drivers of these vehicles and the other drivers. Additionally and still considering these ethical programming issues in isolation, it also becomes clear that we cannot think about a utilitarian vehicle here without thoughts of some degree of legislation.

Additionally, one might argue that Bazerman’s approach leaves out the emotional and relationship components of leadership ethics. For Bazerman, he is focusing on the making rational decisions to ensures the businesses profits, but are the companies leaders maintain ethical behavior outside the business? I say so because it’s very important components of an ethical leader is emotional intelligence and empathy, especially in situations that involve complex stakeholder relationships and culturally sensitive issues. Again, a more holistic approach needs to be taken that incorporates both the rational and the emotional in order to provide a more comprehensive and accurate view of ethical leadership.

Further Insights and Direction for Future Research

Even though this paper serves as the preliminary concept of model it advocates for in Business Ethics, Bazerman paper begins many opportunities for further research. One opportunity is to develop ethical frameworks to other cultural backgrounds. The broader scope of the business in the current day scenario leads researcher to think whether this model can be applied across different cultural landscape which can be the further model of ethical leadership.

Moreover, an extensive evaluation of how ethics integrates with organizational behavior can be advantageous in determining how certain ethical decision-making practices can heavily affect an individual’s overall demeanor in terms of ethics and values. Gaining control of these hypothetical situation can provide insight on how to become a well-rounded leader in the aspect of an ethical culture.

Conclusion

Bazerman’s insight gives a modern view of an ideal leader. Bazerman’s method contradicts ethics from preceding generations by utilizing an ethical model called “Utilitarian” and is demonstrated by the unseen great support men always be deep within.. He opposed historic models of ethical leadership and provided a method called the “Utilitarian” model which is described as taking outcomes of fieldwork into idea before joining any organization. A contemporary model for ethical leadership gives a marvelous perception into difficulties and possibilities for modern ethical leader.

Bazerman also suggests other leader to be “Utilitarian” follower. There also are many counter-criticisms and constraints to Bazerman’s provided Bazerman’s given contemporary model of an ideal leader; nevertheless, Bazerman’s model is a very good way to begin discuss in modern leadership critique and will be a well efficient foundation for literature and studies for ethical leadership. Models of ethical leadership are destined to alter with going forward trends in which an organization might functions; consequently, ethical models of leadership need to be able to reply to real-life human activity.