Leadership Foundations in Research

Externally, my company portrays its values the same as most corporations do: on a webpage marked “ Values, Mission and Vision .” That’s common practice, and it may give visitors a decent idea of what the firm is and what it strives to do, but it doesn’t offer the faintest hint to anyone of how employees actually act, and if the words written down in black and white match the attitudes seen in the hallways and office buildings. For the most part, I think it’s safe to say that the majority of my colleagues behave ethically and that they avoid the slippery slope of Chuck Gallagher’s “unethical continuum” (Gallagher, 2013). One time that they didn’t, however, happened a couple years back, when a former coworker tried to print hundreds of copies of a flier for her “side-hustle” business on company paper. It’s admittedly not the worst/most unethical thing in the world, but what made it worse was that a printer glitch occurred which duplicated the job she sent to the printer. In the end, ...

Ben Franklin’s idea of maintaining a scorecard to help keep him “on track,” when it comes to living a virtuous life, is something I can relate to. Although I’ve never formally written down any standards to live by, I keep a sort of informal doctrine in my head to remind me of my priorities. Over time, I’ve realized that this set of rules not only exemplifies what’s important to me but also reinforces a set of habits that, I’ve learned over time, make me feel the most useful and engaged. In that way, the standards serve as a reminder to live well and do well, as Aristotle (LaFollette, p. 213) would promote. A few of the virtues on Franklin’s list that I relate to most are those of Industry, Order and Resolution. These three tenants are all inter-related, but they can be applied to several facets on life. That’s why I like them — because “theorizing divorced from practice is useless” (LaFollette, p. 216). At first glance, this trio might seem to only deal with discipline, and that’...

The Benefits of Ethical Guidelines Bound by ethical guidelines, marketers are given a sort of playbook, outlining exactly what’s allowed and what isn’t within their business. They can exaggerate how hard it is to complete a simple task in an infomercial advertising a tool meant to improve a given process, for instance (and these segments are usually shot in pale black-and-white for extra effect [and, for my money, they’re the funniest things on TV]). They can’t exaggerate the features of their product in the infomercial, though, or say that it does things that it does not. That structure has to make a difference. The problem with that perspective, though, is that it might seem to imply that, without rules, all marketers would be dishonest. That’s not the case — but, all systems need structure, rules, and guiding principles. Without that playbook outlining the boundaries of what marketing is and isn’t, those working in the industry wouldn’t have parameters within which t...

Because it is such a loaded issue, affirmative action can be a tough one to gauge for worth and impact. On the one hand, it’s founded on good intentions; but on the other, it’s far from a perfect science or system. I “get” both sides of that coin, and I appreciate the conflict between trying to do what’s “right,” but trying to do so smartly. All of that aside, though, affirmative action is ethical in my mind. A consequentialist might argue in support of it because it positively impacts a greater number of people than it supposedly hurts. For this particular issue, that’s the lens through which I see it, too. The greatest argument against affirmative action, to me, is that it hurts those who have done no wrong. This argument is what I want to focus on most here, because it encapsulates a couple of the others, which is what gives it its power. The logic is that a more qualified job candidate can be (or will be) passed up in order to give a job to an African-American candidate — not due t...