Ethics, Leadership and Other Deceptively Complicated Things

James Lemoine.

James Lemoine, Assistant Professor of Organization and Human Resources

Be effective and ethical.

Most of us agree that organizational managers need to be effective leaders—and that ethics are important to such leadership. We often disagree, however, on how to define these terms and what we should expect from an ethical leader. Meanwhile, most organizations offer little in the way of leadership development or ethics training beyond basic sexual harassment or diversity seminars, which often don’t address broader ethical issues.

Join Jim Lemoine, assistant professor of organization and human resources in the UB School of Management, to take a deep dive into what ethics in leadership could mean, and to try to figure out what it does mean. Along the way, you’ll examine ethical dilemmas to reveal just how deceptively complicated this area can become.

Lemoine's research focuses on leadership, ethics and creativity, and has been published in the Harvard Business Review and Business Horizons, as well as prestigious academic journals like the Academy of Management Annals and Journal of Applied Psychology.

His work also frequently appears in magazines such as Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, and Entrepreneur. He serves as a researcher in the UB School of Management's Center for Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness, and is a board member for the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, an international organization dedicated to sharing and promoting the servant leadership philosophy. Prior to obtaining his PhD at Georgia Tech, Lemoine was an entrepreneur, consultant and manager at companies such as AT&T.