Managing Workplace Ethical Dilemmas, Perceptual Ethical Leadership, Accountability, and Management Outcomes: A Critical Review and Future Directions

Abstract

The inquiry of ethical dilemmas and moral predicaments continues to be a significant problem for managers in most workplace environments (Brown & Trevino, 2006). Managers oftentimes find themselves in difficult situations where they must make decisions that uphold organizational ethics, policies, and honor their morality (Brown & Trevino, 2006; Trevino, 2018; Verschoor, 2018). Mostly, employee actions put managers in these compromising situations, where they may be required to make some trying ethical decisions. Considering these perspectives, this study discusses a variety of research on employee actions and other factors that may pose ethical dilemmas to managers. The study also investigates research done by other scholars about management ethical dilemmas and tries to establish the research gaps on what researchers might not have not wholly accomplished in the past. The study proposes to take a qualitative approach to investigate what managers have been doing in the past to address the question of what they must do in the future when they encounter real-world ethical quandaries.