FIT2002 Chap.10 Ethics, Leadership and Reflection
Ethics, Leadership and Reflection
Ethical project management requires more than legal compliance or sponsor preference. Professional duties, consequences, rights, fairness and character can point to different concerns, so a decision should identify affected parties, compare feasible actions and make trade-offs transparent. Utilitarian reasoning examines overall consequences, while deontological reasoning emphasises duties and constraints.
Neither is a slogan that automatically resolves facts.
Leadership shapes whether concerns can be raised and learning becomes action. Directive, participative, servant, shared and situational approaches offer different responses to capability, urgency and team context. Reflection is most useful when it links an observed event to interpretation, consequence and a specific experiment for future work.
In assessment scenarios, make the ethical tension explicit, name the leadership behaviour required, and propose governance that protects both accountability and voice.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Professional obligations and ethical tensions in project decisions
- 02
Stakeholder consequences, rights, fairness and transparent reasoning
- 03
Utilitarian and deontological lenses applied without mechanical answers
- 04
Leadership approaches selected from urgency, capability and context
- 05
Servant and shared leadership as enablement with accountability
- 06
Psychological safety, escalation channels and responsible challenge
- 07
Structured reflection that converts experience into a testable improvement
Worked example · free
Respond to pressure to conceal a weak estimate
- +2Identify the conflict between short-term funding persuasion and duties of honesty, competence and informed stakeholder decision-making.
- +2A consequence lens shows that false certainty can produce approval but also unrealistic commitments, hidden risk and later harm to users, team and sponsor credibility.
- +2A duty lens rejects knowingly misleading decision-makers even if optimistic presentation could produce a beneficial project.
- +2Recommend presenting the range, assumptions and confidence, with a staged validation milestone that can narrow uncertainty before full commitment.
- +2Use calm, evidence-led challenge, document the decision and escalate through the agreed governance path if pressure to misrepresent continues.
Key terms
- Professional Ethics
- Standards and reasoning concerned with responsible professional conduct, including honesty, competence, fairness, respect and accountability. Ethical duties can exceed minimum legal compliance.
- Utilitarianism
- An ethical lens that compares actions through their likely overall consequences for affected parties. Credible use requires evidence, distributional awareness and acknowledgement of uncertainty.
- Deontology
- An ethical lens centred on duties, principles and constraints that should guide action even when violating them might appear to produce useful consequences.
- Servant Leadership
- Leadership that prioritises enabling others, removing impediments and developing capability while retaining responsibility for purpose and accountability. Service is not avoidance of difficult decisions.
- Shared Leadership
- A pattern in which leadership influence moves among team members according to expertise and context. Clear decision rights remain necessary to prevent ambiguity.
- Retrospective
- A structured reflection on events, interactions, processes and outcomes used to choose a concrete improvement. Its value comes from changed future behaviour, not from description alone.
Ethics, Leadership and Reflection FAQ
What should I do when two ethical frameworks point differently?
Make the disagreement visible rather than forcing artificial agreement. Check facts and affected stakeholders, state what each lens highlights, identify non-negotiable duties or rights, and compare feasible actions. Then justify a decision with safeguards and review points. Ethical reasoning is strongest when it acknowledges uncertainty and distribution of harm instead of using one label as automatic permission.
Does servant leadership mean always agreeing with the team?
No. Servant leadership develops capability, removes impediments, listens and protects conditions for effective work, but it still maintains purpose, standards and accountability. A servant leader may challenge poor practice, make a difficult boundary clear or escalate harm. The distinguishing question is whether authority is used to enable responsible value rather than personal control.
How can reflection produce more than a description of events?
Use a sequence such as event, interpretation, effect, alternative and experiment. Identify what evidence changed your understanding, what part of your own behaviour contributed, and one observable action to test next time. Assign timing or a trigger for that action. This turns reflection into a learning control that can be reviewed, rather than a narrative written after the fact.
Assessment move
Build ethics practice around tensions, not isolated definitions. For each scenario list affected stakeholders, relevant duties, likely benefits and harms, evidence gaps, feasible alternatives and an escalation path. Apply at least two lenses and note where they differ.
For leadership, make a context matrix using urgency, team capability, conflict, uncertainty and decision rights; explain why a style or behaviour fits those conditions. Practise distinguishing enabling behaviour from abdication and participation from unclear accountability. Keep a short reflection log using event, interpretation, consequence and next experiment.
Revisit the experiment later and record whether it changed results. In written answers, finish with a specific action, owner, record and review point so that ethical and reflective claims become governable project practice.
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