Ethical Leadership in the Context of CSR

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a complex structured system of relations between an organization and different groups in its internal and external environment that co-exist in the same social system. In Europe, CSR is studied by scholars in context of business ethics and stakeholder theory. However, in reality we can find organizations declaring CSR based on a very narrow scope of philanthropic activities they are engaged in. The article derives from the assumption that if business ethics is incorporated in CSR, it might have positive impact on the quality of leadership and managerial decision-making process. In this article, the authors discuss CSR in Slovak business environment and its link to ethical leadership. Using the Ethical Leadership Scale (ELS) (Brown et al. 2005), perceived ethical leadership was measured on the sample of 790 Slovak managers, and the differences related to engagement in CSR were examined. The results indicate that engagement in CSR has a positive impact on the perceived ethical leadership.