An ethical leader is also one that concentrates on how best to align their organizations; strengths and insights to the needs of the market, and do it with open, honest processes that mitigate any potential for conflict of interest or corruption. The ability of a leader to create cultures where full disclosure is not only tolerated by promoted is key. When organizational leaders can create a high level of trust in an organization, the adoption of ethical practices gets accelerated at a much faster rate (Mayer, Kuenzi, Greenbaum, Bardes, Salvador, 108). Excellent leaders know trust and transparency can act as performance accelerators if used well.

Conclusion

The most effective foundation to sustain long-term organizational change is having strong leadership that has a very high level of accountability and transparency in actions, decisions and strategies...

Ethics, when practiced well, have the same effect on an organization's performance as transformational leadership, in that both act as major accelerators of trust and therefore support long-term change. To ignore ethical in leadership is to ignore the need to continually improve and strengthen an organization.
References

Michael E. Brown, and Linda K. Trevino. "Ethical leadership: A review and future directions. " Leadership Quarterly 17.6 (2006): 595.

Mayer, D., M. Kuenzi, R. Greenbaum, M. Bardes, and R. Salvador. "How low does ethical leadership flow? Test of a trickle-down model. " Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 108.1 (2009): 1.

Toor, S., and G. Ofori. "Ethical Leadership: Examining the Relationships with Full Range Leadership Model, Employee Outcomes, and Organizational…