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Ten years ago UN-Secretary-General Kofi Annan called upon global business leaders to join the fight against human rights violations, inhumane working conditions, the rising threat of pollution and the spreading problem of corruption thereby proposing the Global Compact Initiative as a mean to foster sustainable and socially responsible business practices. Since then the world has witnessed scandals like Enron, WorldCom, Siemens and many other high-profile cases of leadership failure and managerial misconduct. For the present these developments have their climax in the financial sub-prime crises starting in 2007 and the “Euro-crisis” of 2010, which have permeated public discourse and put regulators as well as private actors on the spot to find answers to the new challenges of global business.Yet as politicians and practitioners look towards theory for answers to the rising call for socially responsible leadership hopes for quick fixes or even adequate support are disillusioned. Leadership ethics as the overarching label for questions on ethics, fairness, legitimacy, sustainability etc. in the context of leadership still remains an underdeveloped field (see e.g. Ciulla, 1995; Ciulla, 2005b; Doh/Stumpf, 2005b; Rost, 1995). Within it we find a variety of competing and partly contradictory efforts that focus on different research foci of leadership’s new challenges ranging form aspects of globalization (e.g. Bartlett/Ghoshal, 2003; Danon-Leva, 2005; Mendenhall et. al., 2008), moral responsibility (Brown/Trevino, 2006; Brown/Trevino/Harrison, 2005; Doh/Stumpf, 2005a; Johnson, 2009; Maak/Pless, 2006a; Maak/Pless, 2006b; Sharma/Bhal, 2004) to political theory (e.g. Cradden, 2005; Patzer, 2009).As these hallmarks indicate a dramatic change in the perception of what “good leadership” at the onset of the 21st century is, research is still struggling to address the multitude of new challenges of globally responsible leadership (see e.g. Bennis, 2007; Waldman/Siegel, 2008). It is the aim of this chapter to outline the latter. We do this with regard to the underlying causes for and characteristics of the new leadership challenges (1), as well as the conceptual state of leadership ethics as a research field (2).(1) We argue that the former must be analysed in the context of globalisation. Understood as the processes of socioeconomic transformation (e.g. Beck, 1992; Beck, 2000) globalization has led to regulatory deficits on the level of the nation-state (see Habermas, 2001b) that redefine the societal role of private actors in a globalizing society (e.g. Matten/Crane, 2005; Moon/Crane/Matten, 2005; Scherer/Palazzo/Baumann, 2006). This is the stage for new concepts of global responsible leadership that acknowledges the economic needs of effective leadership and retains moral integrity in the light of ethical pluralism.(2) Globalization, new societal roles and ethical pluralism pose substantial challenges for a new understanding of leadership. Furthermore researchers and practitioners are faced with a research field that is characterized by a pluralism of different labels, research foci and research methodologies. The divide between positivist and post-positivist approaches inhibits efforts for a comprehensive perception of what good leadership means for present and future business.By sketching these challenges of leadership ethics we hope to foster the understanding of the characteristics and challenges of global responsible leadership and to improve dialogue between existing research strands within this new field.