Ethical Dilemmas and Paradoxical Tensions in Decision-Making: Investigating Leadership Perspectives in Private and Public Sector Organisations
通过对24位公私部门高层领导的深度访谈，发现伦理张力因部门而异，领导者通过持续伦理导航和规范性商议来应对不可调和的矛盾，而非做出明确选择。
Abstract Leaders are increasingly confronted with growing complexity in organisational decision-making, particularly when navigating ethical dilemmas, managing inherent tensions, and reconciling conflicting stakeholder interests. This complexity highlights the need to examine leadership practices in diverse institutional settings. While effective decision-making requires a holistic response to the underlying situation, the ethical and value-driven dimensions of the process are often overlooked in the emerging literature. To address this gap, we examined how and why senior leaders in public and private sector organisations experience and navigate paradoxical ethical tensions between personal and organisational values . Drawing on in-depth interviews with 24 senior organisational leaders (e.g. CEOs, senior managers) across both sectors, we explored everyday decision-making practices and the ethical challenges embedded within them. The data were thematically analysed and complemented by text analysis (word frequency and co-occurrence patterns) of interview transcripts, strengthening comparative evidence between sectors. The findings reveal that ethical tensions are not experienced uniformly but vary systematically according to sector-specific configurations of value alignment and misalignment. Public sector leaders navigate paradoxes shaped by collegiality, transparency, sustainability, and autonomy within politically influenced and resource-constrained environments, while private sector leaders confront tensions between organisational emphases on profitability, accountability, and obedience and personal commitments to social justice and empathy. Across both sectors, leaders do not resolve these tensions through definitive choices; instead, they engage in continuous ethical navigation shaped by contextual pressures for change, organisational constraints, and interpersonal dynamics. Normative deliberation emerges as a central coping mechanism through which leaders balance competing demands, justify action, and tolerate residual moral discomfort under conditions of uncertainty and time pressure. We argue that integrating a normative deliberation perspective, institutional theory, and a paradox lens offers a novel way of responding to ethical dilemmas and inherent tensions in managerial decision-making. The findings advance ethical leadership scholarship by offering a process-oriented and context-sensitive account of how leaders act ethically when confronted with enduring and irreconcilable demands, with implications for theory, leadership development, and future research.