Executives and organizations seeking to portray an image of competence and integrity should be careful what they wish for, given the state of modern media. Rather than being a passive conduit for one's image, today's media is much more activist and exerts substantial influence over the construction, reconstruction, and destruction of image. In studying the media's rapid transformation of one such glowing image in the wake of a scandal, we identified three key processes by which the media transforms image. These processes are relevant to a wide range of contexts. Perhaps most intriguing is the discovery that the media can leverage an existing, recessive narrative and convert it into a dominant one. This intriguing finding suggests that the pursuit of a glowing image might inadvertently sow the seeds of future destruction. In the heat of a scandal, executives and organizations are likely to struggle with countering the media's image-altering processes. Our findings imply a need for more careful, nuanced, and engaged image management both during a scandal and before scandal hits.

Fear has shaped human behaviour for a very long time, and it continues to do so today. However, attention to fear in organizational life - how and why it is experienced, and to what effects - has received little attention. The authors argue that the most significant result of fear at work is silence on the part of employees. They describe four types of silence that affect productivity and innovation across industries: Non-Deliberative Defensive Silence, Schema-Driven Defensive Silence, Deliberative Defensive Silence and introduce a new one, Habituated Silence. In addition, they describe the concept of 'voice efficacy', and show how to develop it in oneself and in others in an effort to mitigate the debilitating effects of silence.

Executives should not take a reputation for ethical leadership for granted. Based on interviews with senior executives and corporate ethics officers, this article reveals that a reputation for executive ethical leadership rests on two essential pillars: the executive's visibility as a moral person (based upon perceived traits, behaviors, and decision-making processes) and visibility as a moral manager (based upon role modeling, use of the reward system, and communication). Developing a reputation for ethical leadership pays dividends in reduced legal problems and increased employee commitment, satisfaction, and employee ethical conduct. The alternatives are the unethical leader, the hypocritical leader (who talks the talk, but doesn't walk the walk), and the ethically neutral leader (who may be an ethical person, but employees don't know it because the leader has not made ethics and values an explicit part of the leadership agenda). The article also offers guidelines for cultivating a reputation for ethical leadership.

This survey of employees at six large American companies asked the question: "What works and what hurts in corporate ethics/compliance management?" The study found that a values-based cultural approach to ethics/compliance management works best. Critical ingredients of this approach include leaders' commitment to ethics, fair treatment of employees, rewards for ethical conduct, concern for external stakeholders, and consistency between policies and actions. What hurts effectiveness most are an ethics/compliance program that employees believe exists only to protect top management from blame and an ethical culture that focuses on unquestioning obedience to authority and employee self-interest. The results of effective ethics/compliance management are impressive. They include reduced unethical/illegal behavior in the organization, increased awareness of ethical issues, more ethical advice seeking within the firm, greater willingness to deliver bad news or report ethical/legal violations to management, better decision making because of the ethics/compliance program, and increased employee commitment.