Public Leadership Ethics: A Management Approach

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.

J. Patrick Dobel is the Corbally Professor Emeritus in Public Service at the University of Washington. He teaches at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. His work studies the intersection of politics, institutions and judgment, and his teaching has covered strategy, leadership, public ethics and management. His main research explores the integration of values and institutional structure in articles such as "Holy Evil" and work on leadership legacy or political corruption. As an advisor on ethics and management, he has worked with many public and nonprofit agencies and served as the chair of various ethics commissions such King County and Seattle, Washington. He has authored several award winning articles as well as many others on public leadership, ethics, and integrity in journals such as The American Political Science Review, Public Administration Review, Administration and Society and Public Integrity. His books Compromise and Political Action: Political Morality in Liberal and Democratic Life, and Public Integrity are widely taught and study the reality of ethics in public life.