Rating evaluation of seven presidents' ethical leadership in South Korea

Citizens have ethics for their occupation and also civil service has their own professional ethics. There are many ethics according to their occupation and many subjective and objective ethics at the public service and administration. Public service influences severely on the civil life and has privilege to their action. So citizen wants high quality of subjective and objective occupational ethics to the public service. In South Korea, president's morality and ethics has not been debated and has not been measured for presidency into a field of study. It was not seemed as realistic discourse and ethical man was not proper to presidency of a nation. President Franklin Roosevelt of the United States said "Moral leadership is core of politics" and President Vathulraf Habel of the Checo Republic said "It is normal that politics must become practice of virtues"(The Evaluation Committee of Korean Presidents and the Research Center for Korean Presidency, The Evaluation of Korean Presidents, Seoul: Chosun Ilbo, 2002, p. 98). There have been many problems for evaluating the ethical leadership of the South Korean presidents. First of all, there is no objective measurement to evaluate president's performance. Evaluative measurement for president is focused on the president's characteristic appraisal instead of descriptive evaluation which is different from performance-oriented president's appraisal in the United, States(The Evaluation Committee of Korean Presidents and the Research Center for Korean Presidency, op. cit., p. 99). It is very difficult to judge whether successful or unsuccessful president, because evaluation depends on evaluators' subjectivity, contingency, and situation. As all mankind have prejudice, the prejudice may affect on the evaluation of president's performance. The aim of this study is to know rating evaluation of the seven presidents' ethical leadership. This study examines some different conceptions of ethical leadership, proves how ethical leadership can be applied by the Korean presidents, assesses ethical leadership of the Korean presidents, and identified some things that Korean presidents can do to promote ethical behavior. As far as ethical leadership is concerned, there is considerable disagreement about the appropriate way to define and assess it. As Heifetz(1994) pointed out, there is no ethically neutral ground for theories of leadership, because they always involve values and implicit assumptions about proper forms of influence(Gary Yukl, Leadership in organization, sixth edition, Pearson: Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ. 2006, p. 418).