Contextual Factors and Their Impact on Ethical Leadership in Educational Settings

This discussion paper focuses on the notion of context and its variables and explores how context influences the attempt to practice ethical leadership in educational settings. Three major research questions underline this paper: a. What is the importance of context in the leadership research and what are the contextual factors affecting different notions of ethics, values, their degree of significance, and the way they affect attitudes and behaviors? b. To what extend do educational systems and/or communities share the same notional background about ethics, values, and ethical leadership? c. Can that which is researched and discussed in ethical leadership theory be successfully and effectively transferred into everyday school practice? Our investigation leads us to support the assumption that contextual factors should be included in (ethical) leadership research and the notion of vision and its interaction with the notions of mission and goals should be revisited in a more humanistic rather than managerial way if we wish to run ethical schools and transform them into ethical learning nests to nurture and develop new generations.