Ethical Leadership as a Panacea to Organization Conflict in Nigeria

Many questions on what is the most effective way to handle conflict in public organizations triggered the rationale behind this paper. This paper was an exploration of ethical leadership as a panacea to the organizational conflict in Nigeria. By determining the extent to which ethical leadership can eliminate organizational conflict in Nigeria public organizations. The research work primarily used secondary sources of data in order to unearth issues surrounding organizational conflict. Theory and investigator triangulation were applied in order to ensure the validity and reliability of our findings. The area of concern has attracted many conferences, workshops, and dialogues about the future of Nigerian public organizations as other efforts to eliminate organizational conflicts seemed abortive. The paper explored ethical leadership and found it to comprise essential elements such as humility, fairness, responsibility, respect for others, independence, accountability, and transparency among others. Using Principal-Agency theory, Utilitarian theory and theory of justice and fairness to analyze conflicting situations in an organization discovered that selfish interest, lack of honesty, political interference and lack of humility, injustice among others tend to spring organizational conflict which now leads to organizational-underdevelopment as team spirit is far in the workplace. There is the tendency that the organization will continue to wallow in the militating situation. We recommend that ethical leadership qualities as highlighted in the work should be imbibed in the Nigerian public organizations though, private organizations are not excluded.