The interest in Ethical Leadership (EL) has been present in scholarly literature and business praxis for a long time. The truly flourishing time for research of EL has come already in the contemporary period of history after the two world wars. With every regional war, increased level of globalization and democratization around the world, this interest has been increasing. The 21st century became an apogee for the rising interest in EL in scholarly research.

The growing interest of scholars in EL resulted in the rapid increase of literature on EL. A wide range of peer-reviewed articles, scholarly online publications, as well as both academic and popular science books, have been produced in the last few decades. The diversity of approaches and subtopics studied is astonishing and inspiring. However, this has also led to the phenomenon that this literature has become too comprehensive and wide with an immense number of fragmented various fields and subfields. This makes it hard for aspiring researchers to grasp the whole picture and find new or different angles to look at this phenomenon.

Thus, as seen from the previous subchapter, the field of scholarly research on EL is too broad and lacks unity, is full of questionable assumptions, and has fundamental research gaps. Therefore, it is needed to take a small step in the direction of clearing this field and establishing a broader perspective that could unite the major players in this sphere and help the EL research move forward.

Therefore, this research attempted to study the literature that was written about EL in order to re-evaluate the existing approaches to EL and challenge these views by taking a broader perspective, which would allow distinguishing the underlying assumptions in the theoretical reasoning on ethical leadership, as well as suggest a contemporary re-evaluation of EL with the premise of a broader perspective. 

The research was conducted as a problematizing literature review with three different stages of readings and analyses. 

This research finds out the underlying assumptions in the theoretical reasoning on ethical leadership and offers a few lessons that could be learned from them. Furthermore, this thesis also attempts to point out a few dimensions that shall be considered in further re-evaluation. These dimensions are: more extensive inclusion of moral aspect, co-creation of EL by leaders and followers, multiplicity and subjectivity of EL, as well as the inclusion of a discussion about effectiveness and efficiency of leadership in EL literature.