In organizations, leaders are faced with ethical dilemmas on a daily basis as they balance their own ethics with the company's policies and practices. These pressures leave leaders questioning what is the right thing to do, especially if they hold two competing values.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the recursive nature of the causes and effects of ethical decision making within an organization. Specifically, this researcher examined the relationships among the following: (a) the ways in which leaders experience competing pressures between ethical dilemmas arising from their espoused ethics and their perceptions of their organization's stated or unstated policies and practices; (b) the ways in which leaders' interactions with others affect their resolution of ethical dilemmas; and (c) the ways in which leaders' resolutions of ethical dilemmas then affect the stated or unstated policies and practices of their organizations, as well as future interactions among individuals within the organization.

This study coupled Trevino's (1986) person-situation interactionist model with an examination of complex responsive processes (Stacey, 2001). The findings of this study supported earlier research that demonstrated leaders consider both individual and situational factors when making ethical decisions. The study differed from previous empirical research in that prior studies were primarily quantitative in nature and used a solitary ethical model to study the ethical behavior of leaders.

The findings of this study revealed five meta-themes: (a) participants' values aligned with their definitions of ethics and the ethical dilemmas they experienced; (b) participants had cognitive, physical and emotional reactions to ethical dilemmas; (c) superiors' involvement had a significant bearing on the participants' ethical dilemmas; (d) formal and informal cultural systems and processes influenced the participants' resolution of their ethical dilemmas; and (e) participants' ethical decisions influenced the organization's future decisions and emergent patterns, which may become a legacy in the environment. The finding of intra-participant congruence of ethics' definitions and dilemmas may be a useful contribution to ethicists' ongoing dialog regarding the lack of a common definition in empirical research. The study concluded with contributions to theory and recommendations for organizations, leaders, and education of leaders.