Ethical Leadership Views from Tamil Classical Literature - With Reference to Thirukural

Abstract:     
With increasing incidents of fraud, scandals, corruption on global level, a need is felt to create ethical organization. To create ethical organization, an ethical leadership at the top is needed. Top manager’s actions always provide a blueprint for what a firm’s corporate culture must be. Company’s important requirement on top is integrity, clear ethical values and standards. To maintain such ethical values and standards, corporate leaders should have higher moral development and ethical reasoning. Higher moral awareness is essential in order to achieve ethical organization standard. During current years, demand for ethics training and ethical workshop are increasing among top US, European corporations. Moreover some professional institutions like AICPA (American institute of Certified Public accountant), IMA (Institute of Management accountants), and IIA (Institute of Internal auditors) etc have introduced Ethics course as primary requirement for all the members. As corporations embark on global market for competition, demands for global ethical standard are expanding, instantly leading to more ethical literatures and researches.

Various literatures preaching ethical values and moral living have been found in classical Tamil language. Among them one of the most oldest famous literatures which received world class scholar’s appreciation and additionally being translated into 30 different world languages is none other than “Thirukural”. This literature was crowned as one of the oldest ethical literature, which subscribes to the First Sangam Corpus. Mahatma Gandhi (Father of our nation) has commented this literature as a book of moral life. Several other western scholars also made the same remarks on such literature. In this study researcher tries to correlate Thirukural’s with that of contemporary ethical management theories, concepts and principles. Comparative study will be adapted with Thirukural’s meaning and interpretation with that of ethical management principles. Researcher will identify those views, definition, context which significantly correlates with that of contemporary thoughts and will be presented in the study. This research will explore traits and characters of ethical leadership.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 13

Keywords: Ethical leadership, Thirukural, Dravidian Moral development

JEL Classification: M1, M19

working papers series