ETHICS AND LEADERSHIP: THE CORNERSTONES FOR REGIONAL AND ECONOMIC SUCCESS IN ORGANISATIONS OF THE XXI CENTURY

Organizational and business ethics research has played a fundamental role in stimulating the awareness of the need for a paradigm change. This change is based on the anachronistic nature of already existing paradigms. These are instrumental to thwart economic agents making them unable to respond to challenges launched by the knowledge economy. Theses behavioural blockages prevalent in the economic agents impede any contribution of social and economic change. In this way, negative externalities are revealed upon the regional economic performance. This leads to new leadership visions, with the main objective of propelling employees towards a working environment which is more dignifying, flexible and more productive. Organisational longevity results from open thought provoking, efficient and committed behaviour patterns. For this reason it was our objective to reflect upon these two geographical areas in order to ascertain personality traits concerned with those values related to ethics amongst university students who also were gainfully employed. Organisational change is an active instrument. There may be a close relationship between the organisation’s life cycle and its resistance to new paradigms. Our aim is to analyse whether Portuguese and Welsh Organizations come closer, or grow further apart from those guidelines set out in new organisational demands, whose immaterial nature is gaining importance in sustaining its competitiveness.