PS391 Unit 8 Ethical Leadership Paper Example

The Forklift Checklist Nobody Wanted to Do in Peak Week: A PS391 Unit 8 Ethical Leadership Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS391: Psychology of Leadership

Unit 8 Ethical Leadership Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the warehouse, the managers, the crew and every detail are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Shortcut

Every forklift and reach truck at our Columbus warehouse is supposed to receive a five-minute inspection at the start of each shift: brakes, horn, forks, hydraulic lines, battery. Drivers sign a checklist. During peak week in December, with trucks backed up at the dock and the night crew already behind, the operations manager stopped by and said, "If your drivers want to skip the checklists this week, I'm not going to look too hard. We need the hours."

Seven drivers on my crew heard him. Two looked at me to see what I would say.

What Ethical Leadership Is

Brown et al. (2005) say the ethical leader behaves well in plain view of followers and also pushes them to behave well, by talking about standards with them, rewarding and correcting, and making decisions that hold to those standards. Their reasoning comes from social learning theory: people pick up what is allowed at work mostly by watching their boss, including what the boss lets slide. Workers who saw their leaders this way trusted them more, liked working for them and were more willing to warn management about trouble.

The social learning point mattered most that night. Whatever I said, the drivers would learn from what I did next.

The operations manager had offered a shortcut; my crew was watching to see whether I took it.

The Choice

I told the operations manager, in front of the drivers, that we would keep doing the checklists, and that I would rather explain a slow night than an injury. Then I helped. I asked two experienced drivers to inspect trucks in parallel so the fleet was ready ten minutes sooner, and I did one inspection myself.

The conversation with the operations manager afterward was uncomfortable. He said I had embarrassed him. I said I understood the pressure he was under, that I would make up the time in other ways and that I would not ask drivers to sign a checklist for an inspection they had not done. He did not raise it again that week, and on the last night of peak he thanked the drivers for getting through it safely.

What I Said to the Crew

When the crew clocked in the following night, I spoke to everyone for two minutes. I said that peak week was hard on everyone, that the operations manager was under real pressure and that I respected the drivers who had kept doing their inspections. I said that if anyone ever felt pushed to skip a safety step, by me or anyone else, I wanted to hear about it, and that nobody would be written up for being slower because they followed a safety rule. I did not criticize the operations manager in front of the crew. Brown and colleagues emphasize two-way communication as part of ethical leadership, and I wanted the message to be about the standard, not about winning an argument with my boss.

Making It Safe to Speak Up

Brown and colleagues found ethical leadership related to followers' willingness to report problems, and that turned out to matter. In January, a newer driver told me that a lead picker on another shift had been signing checklists for drivers who arrived late. He said he would not have mentioned it to my predecessor. I raised it with that shift's supervisor and the safety coordinator, without naming the driver, and the practice stopped. One honest choice during peak week had made a later report possible.

Consistency Over Time

A single refusal in December means little if I cut corners in March. I keep a short list of the rules I will not bend under pressure, inspections, lockout procedures before clearing a jam and rest breaks during double shifts, and I review it before every peak period so that the decisions are made before the pressure arrives.

Why It Mattered

Two nights later, a driver found a leaking hydraulic line on a reach truck during the inspection. That truck would have been lifting pallets to the top rack, thirty feet above the aisle, through the rest of the week. The driver who found the leak tagged the truck out of service, and maintenance replaced the line before the next shift.

Ng and Feldman (2015) pooled the studies and found that followers of ethical leaders felt better about their jobs, did their tasks better, helped coworkers more and did less damage through theft, sabotage or slacking, and those links held up even after the other leadership styles measured in the same studies were taken into account. Ethical leadership, in their findings, is not just about avoiding scandals; it shapes how people work.

Idealized Influence

Bass and Riggio (2006) describe idealized influence as leaders acting as role models whom followers trust and want to emulate, often by putting the group's interests and principles ahead of convenience. Doing an inspection myself, during the busiest week of the year, was a small example. Several drivers mentioned it later, not because it was dramatic but because it showed that the rule applied to me too.

What I Learned About the Pressure

The operations manager was not a villain. He was being measured on cases shipped, and nobody above him had said that safety checks would be counted as part of the work. Ethical leadership, in my position, included making that tradeoff visible. After peak week, I proposed that inspection time be built into the shift plan so that it did not appear as lost productivity, and he agreed to raise it with regional management.

The Hard Part

Refusing in front of the crew had a cost. My relationship with the operations manager was strained for several weeks, and I worried about my next review. Brown and colleagues' account assumes that ethical behavior is rewarded or at least tolerated; it is harder when the pressure comes from above.

Conclusion

The forklift checklist offered a shortcut during the hardest week of the year. Brown and colleagues' social learning account explains why the drivers were watching, Ng and Feldman's meta-analysis shows that ethical leadership affects how people work, and Bass and Riggio's idealized influence describes the value of doing the inspection myself. Keeping the checklist, helping to keep it fast and pushing to make safety time visible in the plan were the choices that mattered.

References

Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Brown, M. E., Treviño, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.002

Ng, T. W. H., & Feldman, D. C. (2015). Ethical leadership: Meta-analytic evidence of criterion-related and incremental validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(3), 948-965. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038246