BT21503 BUSINESS ETHICS

FACULTY OF BUSINESS, ECONOMICS AND ACCOUNTANCY

INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT 1 (15%)

Instructions:
1. Fill in the Section (A)
2. Put this form in front of your report on submission

Section (A)

Name: ABDUL KARIM BIN JULKARIM Matric No: BB19110582

Section (B)
Students are required to prepare a report containing summary of topic and problem-solving
questions. For summary of topic, students have the freedom to select any topic or chapter
in the syllabus and are required to summarise the topic based on their own understanding,
with relevant applications in the business ethic context. Students will review and do a
critique on the article with highlights on part of the critique. In the end, students state the
conclusion of the article critique and give recommendation(s)
Output: One (1) Essay (1,500 words maximum)

Reminder: Report must be professionally produced. Referencing is the utmost important.

Students are strongly recommended to read on how to reference sources. Improper
referencing will be penalised 20% of total given marks. A total absence of referencing will
result in the report being rejected. Any documents (journal articles, newspapers clippings,
reports etc.) used for this assignment must be attached as appendix.
1. Students are required to submit one softcopy to Smart UMS by the due date.
2. Please name your softcopy the following BB12345678 Assignment 1

Important Notes
Date of issue: 26 March 2021 Week 2
Date of Submission: 30 April 2021 Week 7

Penalty for late submission: 10% deduction from TOTAL GIVEN MARKS and 5% for every
extra week after date of submission No submission will be given E for the whole course.
 Article Critique
Chapter 11: Ethical Leadership

Ethical leadership has been shown to have significant benefits for both companies
and organisations. According to Heres and Lasthuizen (2010), the majority of ethical
leadership research conducted in the United States focused primarily on the corporate
climate, largely ignoring social and organisational variables that may influence ethical
leadership notions and manifestations. Similarly, most ethics research in Africa focuses on
the private sector, ignoring the public sector, which has a direct impact on people. I choose
this article “Ethical Leadership in South Africa and Botswana,” by P. Cheteni & E. S. Shindika
(2017) because relate with Chapter 11. This article to investigate the extent of ethical
leadership practices in African public utilities. The research aim is to establish potential
benefits from ethical leadership in public sector agencies by analysing ethical leadership
characteristics in the public sector from Botswana and South Africa.

In order to assess how workers viewed their supervisors in terms of being moral
people and moral managers, researcher used a variety of scales to test ethical leadership
expectations in an effort to encompass the broader breadth of ethical leadership scales. A
total of 108 people responded to the survey. The findings show that there were major
variations in managers' moral behaviour expectations. As opposed to Botswana's leaders,
South African leaders were thought to be poorer moral administrators. While there has
been a lot of research done on ethics, ethical leadership has gotten a lot less coverage. As a
result, a number of African countries have experienced massive mismanagement of public
funds and corruption. By using taxpayer money to improve his homestead, the South
African Constitutional Court ruled that the President had failed to uphold, protect, and
honour the Constitution. On the other hand, Botswana has a Directorate on Corruption and
Economic Crime that deals with issues like corruption, embezzlement, and fraud, to name a
few.
 A research of this magnitude was needed due to the magnitude of the task. As a
result, this article concludes that ethical leadership decadence in public institutions is a
pressing issue that requires immediate attention. The findings of this research Rasheed's
(2014) assertion that lack of accountability, unethical behaviour, and corrupt practises have
become so pervasive in Africa and have even become institutionalised standards of
behaviour that now possible to talk of an ethical crisis in African public services. While there
are a few countries, such as Namibia and Botswana, that have acceptable levels of
corruption, the majority of African countries have the opposite problem.

Among the strengths found in this article is that the research of the article has
exposed to the reader about the practice of ethical leadership in South Africa and Botswana
in detail. Readers can also know and understand the potential of ethical leadership in the
public sector from Botswana and South Africa through this article well. From the reviews,
researcher has extensive knowledge of developments on ethical leadership in the public
sector in Botswana and South Africa. For example, researchers have discussed the systems
of ethics and governance frameworks in the public sector in the South African context can
be well traced and explained fully after the apartheid regime than during apartheid. While
Botswana has relatively strong and well-functioning governance institutions, both public and
private. The country has a dual legal system, comprising of customary law and common law,
which consists of English and Roman Dutch law, as amended by statutes (United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime – UNODC, 2014). This article is informative and suitable for
readers who want to know more about the practice of ethical leadership in organizing in a
country.

Moreover, the strength of this article is that the researcher has studied the of
potential ethical leadership practice and analysed them well. The researcher has his own
knowledge and mind to present his opinion. From there, researchers can establish potential
benefits of ethical leadership in public sector agencies by analysing the characteristics of
ethical leadership in the public sector of Botswana and South Africa. Researchers in his
article say that there were significant differences between the perceptions of managers’
moral conduct. South African leaders were perceived as relatively weaker moral managers
as compared to those in Botswana.
 Next, the way the facts and information are arranged by the author or researcher is
also one of the strengths of this article. The researcher organizes the information in an
interesting way where the main topic and sub -topics are separated. Paragraphs of
important facts in an article and researchers have done their best in simplifying the
sentences and ideas more easily understood by the reader.

The lack of this article can be seen in terms of target readers where it is aimed more
at educators or relevant parties in the field of education. This can be seen through his use of
terminology and the way he writes. This also brings us to the problem of the use of possible
terms confuse the reader. Readers may be confused by the use of such term like
Maladministration, heterogeneous, righteousness, legislations, nepotism, autonomous law,
misquoting hours and proliferation which may not be known to some readers of this article.
This is likely to cause readers to lose interest in the article because ordinary readers are not
equipped with such knowledge.
.
The purpose of this article is to assess ethical leadership in African countries,
particularly South Africa and Botswana. They hope that by comparing them, they will be
able to identify ethical leadership gaps in South African public institutions that can be
addressed in order to improve local governance performance. However, it is noteworthy
that ethical violations, corruption, and maladministration are not problems specific to
African countries only. Differences about what ethics mean between South Africa and
Botswana may have a negative impact on the conclusions and similarities in this report. As a
consequence, I propose that the concepts and characteristics of ethical leadership be
investigated in South Africa and other African countries, as they have been in Ireland, China,
and the United States.

Furthermore, the researcher did not account for other factors that could influence
ethical leadership or behaviour such as demographic factors. For example, the organisation
size tends to influence ethical decision-making and that as organisation size increases,
individual ethical beliefs and ethical decision-making behaviour decreases. I recommend
that these variables be investigated in future models in an African context which would aid
in determining where to focus efforts to help improve ethical leadership and behaviour.
 References
P. Cheteni, E. S. Shindika (2017). Ethical Leadership in South Africa and Botswana.
Brazilian Administration Review, Rio de Janeiro, v. 14, n. 2, art. 6, e160077, 2017
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319088991_Ethical_Leadership_in_South
_Africa_and_Botswana
Heres, L., & Lasthuizen, K. (2010, July). Ethical leadership: A vermiform universal
phenomenon. Proceedings of Annual Conference of the European Group for Organizational
Studies, Lisbon, Portugal, 26.