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Research confirms that leaders continue to struggle in earning followers’ trust, commitment, and organizational citizenship. The purpose of this paper is to explain the importance of the relationship between leader and followers as a covenant and to identify five roles of the leader that are necessary to be effective in creating the required relationship with followers to earn their trust in an increasingly competitive and complex market.

The approach of this paper is to present a summary of the nature of psychological contracts and to identify seven testable propositions about covenantal leadership and its ability to build trust and honor duties implied in psychological contracts of employees.

The authors explain how the five roles of the covenantal leader increase trust and examine each of these roles in identifying the importance of covenantal leadership in serving the modern leader.

This research reaffirms the importance of leaders understanding the often unarticulated perceptions of their employees in imposing moral duties and obligations on leaders and organizations.

The practical value of this paper lies in its insights about the importance of leaders understanding and honoring implied as well as stated duties, and in recognizing employee perceptions about their needs and the often unaddressed obligations of leaders and organizations.

The underlying assumptions of this paper are that leaders who seek to create greater commitment and higher performance can do so by seeking out, understanding, and honoring the implicit and explicit assumptions and expectations of their employees.

Covenantal leadership is a relatively new leadership model introduced by Moses Pava (2003) and the five roles of covenantal leadership have rarely been addressed as a leadership perspective in the scholarly and practitioner literature.

This paper reports the results of an extensive study of the effectiveness of MD&As. Our primary research question can be stated as follows: To what extent do MD&As, as currently issued, meet the self‐perceived needs of individual investors? To answer this question, we examine the responses to a survey questionnaire. The content of the questionnaire was based on an earlier survey conducted in 1973 by Epstein (1975). Our results are based on a random sample of shareholders owning at least 100 shares of one stock on either the New York Stock Exchange or the American Stock Exchange. We conclude that the MD&A section of annual reports is a potentially useful investment tool. In its current state, however, investors read it less, and rank it as less useful than the financial statements. Our survey indicates that it is not difficult to understand. We attribute its poor performance, in part, to a lack of credibility, and, to a larger extent, to a lack of prospective information. Evidence on the relationship between demographic characteristics and usefulness shows that wealthy, inexperienced investors are the only group of investors who are currently using the MD&A in any substantial way.

For more than 70 years, leaders of all types have consistently struggled to earn the respect and followership of others to earn the employee trust which is the key to innovation and competitive advantage and to create organizational systems and cultures that fit their strategic objectives. The purpose of this paper is to address what would be “good enough” leadership qualities.

Research methodology included research into several individuals that exceeded in leadership, and an examination of how they used the “good enough” leadership styles to be successful as leaders.

This paper suggests several ways to be an effective “good enough” leader. These ways translate your values into concrete directives, jettison dead metaphors, explore enlivening ones, subject your values to the test of dialogue, and hold onto your values less tightly.

Leadership and leadership qualities have been widely discussed in the literature. This paper approaches the situation differently. Rather than striving for perfection and being frustrated for not reaching it, this paper explores “good enough” leadership qualities that actually work well in the professional arena.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

“In every generation, each person must regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt.” This prescription of the Haggadah promises that there is a way of reading and speaking about Exodus that allows one to embellish old stories and to make them new in order to re-energize the ideal of biblical redemption, making it relevant to our everyday lives.

Redemption in the Exodus narrative can be read not only as a historical record of ancient events, but can also be understood as creating a counter-culture of hope when all that has been experienced until now is one of pure necessity. Redemption, in this view, is an ongoing, everyday activity. It is creating islands of stability in a seemingly meaningless and unresponsive universe.

In this article, I identify and explores several rabbinic conceptions of everyday redemption including 1-mirror play, 2-deep dialogue, and 3-and the institutionalization of Torah study. The article also briefly discusses the inherent and dangerous temptation of overreaching and demanding an otherworldly redemption (Redemption with a capital R) in the here and now. The article concludes with a description of some practical contemporary examples of everyday redemption in business.

The purpose of the series is to explore the central and unique role of organizational ethics in creating and sustaining a flourishing, pluralistic, free enterprise economy. The primary goal of the research studies published here is to examine how profit seeking and not for profit organizations can be conceived and designed to satisfy legitimate human needs in an ethical and meaningful way.

This introduction to the 20-year anniversary issue of Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations notes that the role of organisations in society, the international and multidisciplinary scope of business ethics and the importance of narrative, issues identified in the early volumes, remain important.