Introduction:

The report aims at providing an overview on leadership and culture in the context of the organization. The report therefore commences with the definition and exploration of the character and personality by specially focusing on the definition of character and leadership with focus on the importance of the character of leadership. In this section, the report would also mention the types of character and goes on to explain its relevance to leadership. The report also helps in exploring the ethical dimensions and values of the character in the range of defining the ethical values and beliefs, put forward examples where ethics, values and beliefs influences leadership and how changes occurs in the ethical beliefs and values based on the different situations. The report would also provides an insight into the Great Man Theory, Trait Theory, emotional styles of leadership, transformational and situational leadership and the challenges and issues faced by the leader possess different values in respect of the leadership style. The report would also mentions some practical examples including the leadership style of Nelson Mandela, British Petroleum, President’s club and the ethical dilemma of hospital. In the report there would also be a section dedicated to the impact and role of the philosophical paradigms in relation to the traditional versus the modern leadership styles, leaders are born versus made and the challenges faced by the young leaders.

Leadership refers to the ability of the individuals or group of individuals in influencing and guiding the followers or other members of the organization (Summerfield 2014) . Thus, leadership involves making sound decisions, sometimes involving difficult ones thereby resulting in the creation of a clear vision, establishment of achievable goals and providing the followers with the tools and knowledge necessary for the achievement of the goals. Thus, leadership captures the fundamentals for inspiring others. Effective leadership depends on communication of both the original and borrowed ideas to others in a manner that engages them enough for acting in a manner defined by the leader. In other words, leaders act as an inspiration and director of the action. The leader represents the person belonging to the group who possess a combination of the leadership skills and personality that encourages others in following directions.

Definition of Character

Character represents the features or attributes that not only distinguishes but also makes up the individual. Evaluation of character is done based on stable moral qualities of an individual. The concept of the character implies a combination of various attributes that also included the lack or existence of virtues including courage, empathy, fortitude, loyalty, honesty and the good habits and the behavior (Kraatz and Flores 2015).  Moral character primarily represents the grouping of the qualities that distinguishes one individual from the other. However, in the cultural context, the set of the moral values to which the social group adhere helps in defining and uniting it in the cultural perspective in comparison to the others. Thus, moral character is defined by disposition of expressing the behavior in the consistent patterns across a range of situations (Inkeles 2017).

The notion of character holds utmost importance for an effective leader since it helps in building trust without which people would not follow him or her (Alfano 2013). By gaining the trust of the people, leaders can not only motivate them but also ensure accomplishing extra ordinary things. Our character represents a mark into something that is enduring. Similar to moulding mannerisms character needs a chiselling touch. The most enduring thing about an individual represents the features and the traits that apparently form the nature of the individual.  A leader in possession of a good character has higher score for integrity, compassion, responsibility and forgiveness (Cooper 2014). Thus, character represents an essential trait for leadership.

 A leader with character helps in achieving results that transcends everyday organizational outcomes and imperatives. There are various types of characters possessed by a leader like integrity, honesty, intelligence, courageous, fairness, straightforward and inspiring. Integrity represents having stronger core values and moral principles with which the leader conducts his or life along with guiding his followers (Bauman 2013). Honesty on the part of the leaders represents telling the truth. Leaders should be intelligent enough in reading, studying and seeking challenging assignments. They should also be courageous that is possess enough perseverance in accomplishing the goals regardless of the persisting obstacles. Fair-minded leaders ensure fair treatment to all the people. Leaders should be straightforward enough for making sound judgment and taking good decisions. The mental, physical and the spiritual stamina possessed by the leaders inspire others in reaching newer heights.

Character is relevant to leadership since it helps them in adding the following characteristic (Crossan et al 2013):

Moral Courage and Self-discipline: This enables the leaders in practicing self-control for balancing their desires with others need and have enough courage for dealing with risk, fears and dangers

Instil Core Values: This involves developing a sense of values that helps in guiding everyday behaviour

Instil Sense of Identity: Helps the leaders in knowing and believing in themselves

Integrity: This helps the leaders in aligning their actions, thoughts and feelings with his/her values.

Exploring the Ethical Values and Belief Dimensions of Character

Ethical values represent a set of established principles that governs the virtuous behaviour. For assuring the  good business reputation of the company many business managers concerned with the public relations helps  in developing and promoting a suitable set of ethical values for the staffs within the company so that they are kept in mind while dealing with the customers(Ford and Richardson 2013). Ethics also reflects about the beliefs regarding what is right, wrong, just, unjust, good as well as bad in terms of the human behaviour. Ethical beliefs helps in shaping the ways in which one lives with focus on what one does, what one makes and the world created through the  choices.

Ethics, values and beliefs remain open for interpretation. However, there exist few defined interpretations of how the ethics is viewed in terms of the behaviour. Ethics, values and beliefs influences leadership in an organization. Ethical leadership based on values and beliefs helps in handling diverse situations in an organization. Leadership influenced through ethics are able to handle the diverse interest of the multiple stakeholders and help in developing a vision for the organization (Doh and Quigley 2014). Such leaders only deliver their work with integrity but also ensure taking risk. They also help in communicating relevant operations and provide necessary response to any kind of criticism. A leader influenced by values, ethics and beliefs also helps in the development of the self-confidence and follower skills.

This is explained with the concept of situational ethics. Situational ethics takes in account a specific context of a particular act when undertaking ethical evaluation instead of judging it as per the moral standards (Jones, Kelsey and Brown 2014). In situational ethics in order to have an the intent for ensuring a fair basis of the judgements or actions, one need to look at the personal ideals that seems appropriate for guiding them rather than changing the universal ethical code of conduct. For instance, one might seem right when he or she lies to some person when asked about his or her opinion even when lying in some other situations would be ethically wrong. Again a man sacrificing himself for saving the lives of majority of the people is considered an ethical behaviour which otherwise would have been an unethical act.

Contextualising a Range of Relevant Leadership Theories

According to the Great Man Theory of Leadership, some people take birth with necessary attributes that sets them aside from the others and such traits held responsible for assuming the positions of the power and the authority (Spector 2016). This theory portrays the leader as a hero who can accomplish the goals against all obstacles for the sake of his followers. The Great Man Theory puts forward that those in power deserves to stay there because of their special abilities. Moreover, the theory also puts forward that the great leaders share similar characteristics irrespective of the place they are in or the role they played.

The Trait Theory

The Trait Theory of Leadership depends on the characteristics of leaders, both successful and unsuccessful and is used for predicting the effectiveness of leadership (Fleeson and Jayawickreme 2015). The list of traits is  held as parameter for comparing the potential leaders in accessing their likelihood of failure and success .However, core set of traits of successful leaders has been identified which includes achievement drive, leadership motivation, integrity and honesty, self-confidence, cognitive ability, business knowledge, emotional maturity, charisma, creativity and flexibility. However, the mentioned traits are not solely responsible for identification of a successful leader but they do act as preconditions that endow people with the leadership potential.

Six emotional leadership styles include (Giltinane 2013):

1. Visionary Leader:The visionary leader helps in moving people towards shared vision thereby telling them where to go without guiding them how to reach there. Thus, such leaders motivate people for struggling forwards. They share information openly thereby providing knowledge power to the others.
2. Affiliative Leader:  The affiliative leader helps in creation of connections amongst people and hence maintains harmony with the organization. This represents a collaborative style that focuses on the emotional needs over the work needs.
3. Coaching Leader: The Coaching Leader helps in connecting the wants to the organizational goals by holding longer conversations that reaches beyond workplace, helping the people find their strengths and weaknesses and thereby tying them to the career aspirations and the actions. 
4. Pace Setting Leader: The Pace-setting Leader helps in building exciting goals and challenges for the people thereby expecting excellence. They themselves exemplify the  goals and identifies poor performers.
5. Commanding Leader: The Commanding Leader helps in soothing fears and provides clear directions through his or her powerful stance and commanding attitude with the expectation of full compliance. These leaders require emotional self-control for determining success and may seem distant and cold.
6. Democratic Leader: The Democratic Leader ensures valuing commitment and inputs through participation through listening of both the bad and good news

Situational leadership emerged as prominent approach of organizational leadership during the first half of the 21st century (McCleskey 2014). While other leadership approaches depends on the approach and trait of the leader, the situational leadership depends on the idea that the leader is able to adapt to the situation that he faces.  A transformation in the organization represents a virtual makeover where the company goes through the change in the philosophy or moves in newer direction. Transformational leaders are brought for specifically heading the operation when it either is in a flux or is embarking on some significant changes. These leaders have stronger passion and a vision for accomplishing greater things (Odumeru and Ogbonna 2013)

The issues and challenges faced by leaders whose values differ from leadership style differ includes:

1. They lack in the development of managerial effectiveness:  This includes time management, strategic thinking, prioritization, decision making and be more effective at work.
2. Lack of Inspiring Others: Faces challenges in inspiring and motivating others for ensuring that they are satisfied with the jobs and are working smarter.
3. Lacks Capability in Developing the Employees: Faces challenges in developing others including coaching and mentoring
4. Lacks Efficiency in Leading a Team: Lacks efficiency in building a team thereby developing and managing it
5. Unable to Guide a Change: Finds challenges in mobilizing, managing, leading and understanding the change. Guiding a change involves mitigating consequences, overcoming the resistance to the changes and dealing with the reactions of the employees to any kind of changes.
6. Effective Management of Internal Stakeholders and Politics: They also face challenges in managing politics, relationships and image. This challenge involves gaining the managing support and getting the buy-in from the other departments, individuals or groups.

Practical Examples

The evolution of Nelson Mandela as strategic leader attributed to the sacrifice, courage, wisdom and nobility of his life and elevated him to a level where he could be compares to Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi. The strategic leadership brought about by Nelson Mandel helped in ensuring genuine democracy in the country. Nelson Mandela initiated three strategic decisions that make him stand out. He made the first strategic decision shortly after the government declared his conditional release from prison that he denied as he thought that it would betray his leadership, ideals and the long struggle of the African National Congress (ANC). His second strategic decision came before being the elected president and during the assassination of Chris Hani, a popular and well-known black leader who fought for the equality of rights. The third strategic decision came in the year 1994 after he became the elected president of South Africa for celebrating political emancipation (Denning 2018).

British petroleum (BP) was one of the largest oil and gas companies of the world with widespread operations across the diverse sectors. BP underwent the deepwater horizon oil spill during the year 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico (Holcomb 2018). This is regarded as one of the worst accidental oil spill occurring in the oil and gas industry that killed around 11 people with millions of oil barrels gushing over the Mexican gulf thereby resulting in negative impacts on the ecology, tourism and fisheries. The crisis at such a massive scale resulted in the failure of management and leadership.

President Club represents a British charity known for annual charitable dinner between the years 1995 to 2018. The dinner was held only for the male guests and at The Dorchester Hotel in London (Lusher 2018). The club engaged in various types of club meeting and board meeting. Horizontal leadership was preferred at the club meeting while vertical leadership followed at the board meetings.

Ethical Dilemma of the Hospital

The ethical dilemma faced by hospital is as follows (Fritch et al 2013):

1. Avoidance of the conflict of interest:Nurses and doctors are the primary targets for the promotions of equipment and the medical device manufacturers. Medical specialty societies have announced voluntary code of ethics in the year 2010 for limiting the influence of the for profit enterprises.
2. Balancing the profit with the serving patients and ensuring charity care:Ethical decisions involving the  business operations needs a harder look in considering whether organizations  should invest in scarce resources in the profit making areas or invest in the areas that provides them with the basic care of  a larger number of patients.
3. Wresting with equality of payments for VIPs and the public:To understand how hospital treats wealthy people or public differently, monitoring of the individual cases should take place before the policies are put in places for clarifying the expectations.
4. Managinggeriatric and pediatric patients without capacity of decision-making: If a patient is unable to provide an informed consent to the medical provider then it becomes the responsibility of the legally authorized representative to take the decision based on the preferences of patients.
5. Addressing the moral distress of the nurses:Nurses often feel that they are hurting people instead of helping them and bothered that some patient have to goes without required care due to lack of funds.

Role and Impact of Relevant Philosophical Paradigms

In Traditional Leadership Style, leadership represents an individual position where a leader tries to keep his position and thereby move up the ladder. According to traditional leadership style, it was not possible for to have more than a single leader (Kellis and Ran 2013). Here, the leader played the role of providing necessary guidance and controlling the followers. The traditional style of leadership took tough decisions without considering the conditions of the other community members. However, the Modern Style of Leadership represented a concept where the purpose of the leadership represented a structure where the community members worked in synchronization with one another. The modern leadership style is not only concurrent, collective, collaborative and compassionate (Schedlitzki and Edwards 2017).

Great Man Theory and Trait theories put forward that people inherit certain traits and qualities that makes them suited for leadership (Sethuraman and Suresh 2014). Some inborn characteristics predispose people in becoming leaders. Moreover, there lies a significant difference between learning a skill and mastering it. People born with these characteristics will naturally excel in the areas. Thus, leaders are born.

On the other hand, the behavioral theories determine that people can become a leader through the process of learning, teaching and observation (Antonakis and Day 2017). Leadership represents a set of skills learnt through training, practice, perception and experience. Hence, leadership is an acquired skill.

Challenges Faced by Young Leaders

The challenges faced by the young leaders include (Maxwell 2018):

1. Delegation: Young leaders have more reliance on their ability than trusting on other’s abilities.
2. Leading those who are older: Young leaders sometimes miss the vital aspects that the older employees can inculcate in the team
3. Limitation of Experience: They simply does not have the years of experience related to the process of decision-making and faced the consequences of decisions from which they can learn. 
4. Impatience: They possess a lot of impatience and come with a lot of desires and ideas that the organization is not ready to accept for the time being.
5. By Focusing beyond Self:  The young leaders seem to be concerned with their success and advancement compared to any other thing.

Conclusion:

The report ends by providing an insight into the challenges faced by the young leaders. Leadership is an art rather than a science. It is a set of innate traits, refined and perfected over time with education, training and experience. Through the report, one is able to develop an insight ethical, values and beliefs of leadership along with the description of the various theories. The report also focuses on practical examples like Nelson Mandela, British Petroleum, President’s Club and the Ethical dilemma of the hospital.

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