Saying sorry: Ethical leadership and the act of public apology

How do top representatives exercise ethical leadership in the context of public apologies? This paper examines public apologies made by corporate and government leaders for organizational wrongdoing. Conducting qualitative case-research, our deductive inquiry demonstrates that ethical leadership strategies that have been formulated for organizational contexts are utilized in the public arena and adapted to meet the particular demands of this context. We also inductively derive four aggregate strategies that leaders employ: “articulating values in relation to past and future”; “defining the wrongdoing”; “constructing moral communities” and “differentiating responsibilities”. We discuss the findings vis-à-vis the body of literature on ethical leadership, and identify some thorny ethical issues for further investigation.