Principals' Moral Agency and Ethical Decision-Making: Toward a Transformational Ethics

This descriptive study provides a rich portrait of moral agency and ethical decision-making processes among a sample of Canadian school principals. Using an ethical responsibility framework linking moral agency and transformational leadership, the researchers found that (1) modeling moral agency is important for encouraging others to engage their own moral agency in the best interests of all children; (2) despite efforts to engage in collaborative decision-making, principals are often faced with the reality that they are the ones to absorb the cost of decisions; and (3) moral agents need to become wide-awake to the ethical issues and challenges that permeate their day-today work lives.