Editorial Ethical Leadership An Overview and Future Perspectives

concerns a relatively new and empirically unexplored terrain of leadership, that is, ethical leadership. Contemporary orga-nizations express a strong need for leaders who behave in an ethical manner and encourage employees to adopt this behav-ior in their daily work. It is surprising to see that, despite this urgent call, ethical transgressions are very much common-place, as such emphasizing the need to increase our insight into the workings of ethical leadership. In this issue, we bring together research on the antecedents, processes, and conse-quences of ethical as well as unethical leadership and, to start off with, we describe the emerging field of ethical leadership and identify future directions in this introductory editorial. Leaders have been crucial for group survival from the early history of our species when people solely lived in small hunter-gatherer bands (Hogan & Kaiser, 2005). I