Integrity And Leadership: The Importance Of Leadership In Leadership

"Those who conduct themselves with morality, integrity and consistency need not fear the forces of inhumanity and cruelty." (Mandela, 2003)

As I peruse the quote, my mind begins to accelerate trying to grasp what the meaning of the quote is. I check up some of the words in the dictionary to know what they mean. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, morality is the belief about what is right and what is wrong in terms of behavior, integrity is the quality of honesty and fairness, consistency is the agreement between parts or elements as a whole, inhumanity refers to the quality of being wicked to other people or animals and cruelty is the desire to cause suffering among people. With these definitions in place, it makes the quote fairly

Integrity in leadership is very crucial because according to Jack Welch, integrity is one of the few things needed to be considered before anything else. “Integrity in all things precedes all else. The open demonstration of integrity is essential; followers must be wholeheartedly convinced of their leaders ' integrity. Leaders with integrity inspire confidence in others. It is the most critical factor in building a committed team. Because leaders with integrity can be trusted to do what they say they are going to do” (Astin and Astin, 2001; DePree, 1992, p. 10; Northouse, 2001, p. 20 as cited by Storr, 2004). I believe integrity is important because a leader who doesn’t have integrity may use crude means to achieve a goal and this might bring trouble to him and his followers in the long run. Basically, having integrity means the leader has succeeded in creating and sustaining an ethical environment around him. This leader stands for his values and does not give in to pressures of the society or environment. An example of such a leader would be my Elective math teacher back in Senior High school. He was a man who was highly respected and loved by everyone. He always gave us advice on how to live right and be honest. Before our final exams, some teachers were providing students with possible questions and my teacher never did that. Even when possible questions were taken to him to solve, he never

This change does not occur immediately though. It might take a very long time because definitely, he would face opposition and if he has the courage to confront his opponents and stand for his values no matter what or how painful it is, then he is a true leader. (Komives, 2013) An example of such a leader is Jesus Christ. When Jesus was fasting for forty days and forty nights, the devil decided to tempt him three times to see whether he would succumb but fortunately, Jesus combated all three temptations with scriptures he was driven by and it helped in that situation. Today we learn from him and through that experience, it teaches us to stand for our values no matter how tempting an offer would be. Such a leader caused great transformational change just by his actions and