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Guest Editors’ Introduction: Philosophical Contributions to Leadership Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 December 2017

Joanne B. Ciulla ,
David Knights ,
Chris Mabey  and
Leah Tomkins
Joanne B. Ciulla
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
David Knights
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Chris Mabey
Affiliation:
Middlesex University
Leah Tomkins
Affiliation:
The Open University
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Abstract:

This article introduces the first of two special issues on philosophical approaches to leadership ethics. In it, we show some of the ways that philosophy contributes to the study of leadership and leadership ethics. We begin with an overview of how philosophers have treated some of the ethical aspects and challenges of leadership. These include discussions of self-interest, the problem of dirty hands, responsibility, moral luck, power, gender and diversity, and spirituality. The articles in this issue draw on philosophy to explore a variety of ethical questions related to leadership and the relationships that leaders have with followers and others.

Keywords

leadership ethicsethical leadershipresponsible leadershipleadership and philosophycritical leadership studiespowerdiversityspirituality
Type
Special Section
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2017 

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References

NOTES

1. Joanne B. Ciulla, ed., “Introduction,” Ethics, The Heart of Leadership, 3rd edition (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2014), xv.

2. David C. Smith, “Ethics and Leadership: The 1990’s Introduction to the Special Issue of the Business Ethics Quarterly,” Business Ethics Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1995): 1.

3. Michael E. Brown, Linda K. Treviño, and David A. Harrison “Ethical Leadership: A Social Learning Perspective for Construct Development and Testing,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 97, no. 2 (2005): 117–134.

4. Jessica Flanigan, “Philosophical Methodology in Leadership Ethics,” Leadership. Published online June 13, 2017. doi: 10.1177/1742715017711823.

5. There are a number of articles on these topics in Jacqueline Boaks and Michael Levine eds., Leadership and Ethics (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

6. Joanne B. Ciulla, “Leadership Ethics: Mapping the Territory,” Business Ethics Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1995): 5–24.

7. Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott, eds., Critical Management Studies (London: SAGE, 2011).

8. Dennis Tourish, The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).

9. David Knights, and Majella O’Leary, “Leadership, Ethics and Responsibility to the Other,” Journal of Business Ethics 67, no. 2 (2006): 125–137; David Knights, “Leadership, Masculinity and Ethics in Financial Services,” in The Routledge Companion To Leadership, ed. John Storey, Jean Hartley, Jean-Louis Denis, Paul ‘t Hart and Dave Ulrich (London: Routledge, 2017), 332–347.

10. Carl Rhodes, “Ethics, Alterity and the Rationality of Leadership Justice,” Human Relations 65, no. 10 (2012): 1311–133.

11. Donna Ladkin, “When Deontology and Utilitarianism Aren’t Enough: How Heidegger’s Notion of ‘Dwelling’ Might Help Organizational Leaders Resolve Ethical Issues,” Journal of Business Ethics 65, no. 1 (2006): 87–98; Donna Ladkin “From Perception to Flesh: A Phenomenological Account of the Felt Experience of Leadership,” Leadership 9, no. 3 (2013): 320–334; Alison Pullen A and Sheena Vachhani, “The Materiality of Leadership,” Leadership 9, no. 3 (2013): 315–319.

12. Helena Liu and Christopher Baker, “White Knights: Leadership as the Heroicisation of Whiteness,” Leadership 12, no. 4 (2016), 420–448; Helena Liu, “The Masculinisation of Ethical Leadership Dis/embodiment,” Journal of Business Ethics 144, no. 2 (2015): 263–278.

13. Robert C. Solomon, “Emotional Leadership, Emotional Integrity,” in The Quest for Moral Leaders: Essays on Leadership Ethics, ed. Joanne B. Ciulla, Terry L. Price, and Susan E. Murphy (Cheltenham, UK and Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005); Ruth Capriles, Leadership by Resentment (Cheltenham, UK and Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012).

14. Joanne B. Ciulla ed., “Introduction,” The Ethics of Leadership (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2003), xi-xv.

15. Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1992), 23.

16. Manuel Mendonca and Rabindra Kanungo, The Ethical Dimensions of Leadership (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996).

17. Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

18. Nannerl O. Keohane, “Democratic Leadership and Dirty Hands,” in Ethics: The Heart of Leadership, 3rd edn., ed. Joanne B. Ciulla (Santa Barbra, CA: Praeger, 2014), 151–176.

19. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Quenton Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 54.

20. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in M. Weber Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 125–6.

21. Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1973): 160–168.

22. Joanne B. Ciulla, “Ethics and Effectiveness: The Nature of Good Leadership,” in The Nature of Leadership, 2nd edition, ed. David V. Day and John Antonakis (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), 508–540.

23. James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).

24. See Eva Kort, “What, After All is Leadership? Leadership and Plural Action,” Leadership Quarterly 19, no. 4 (2008): 411–25.

25. See for example, Alejo J.G. Sison, The Moral Capital of Leaders (Cheltenham, UK and Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2003).

26. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. W.D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, volume two, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 1747.

27. Terry L. Price, Understanding Ethical Failures in Leadership (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

28. James R. Meindl, Sanford B. Ehrlich, and Janice M. Dukerich, “The Romance of Leadership,” Administrative Science Quarterly 30, no. 1 (1985): 78–102.

29. Kenneth E. Goodpaster and John Matthews, Jr., “Can a Corporation Have a Conscience?” Harvard Business Review 60, no. 1 (1982): 132–141.

30. See, Nicola M. Pless and Thomas Maak, “Responsible Leadership: Pathways to the Future,” Journal of Business Ethics 98, no. S1 (2011): 3–13.

31. Bernard A.O. Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

32. Norman E. Bowie, “A Kantian Theory of Leadership,” The Leadership and Organization Development Journal 2, no. 4 (2000): 185–193.

33. Ann Cunliffe, “The Philosopher Leader: On Relationalism, Ethics and Reflexivity—A Critical Perspective to Teaching Leadership,” Management Learning 40, no. 1 (2009): 87–101.

34. Gail Fairhurst and S. Connaughton, “Leadership: A Communicative Perspective,” Leadership 10, no. 1 (2014): 8.

35. David Collinson, “Dichotomies, Dialectics and Dilemmas: New Directions for Critical Leadership Studies?” Leadership 10, no. 1 (2014): 36–55.

36. Dennis Tourish, The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 88.

37. Although there are several, here is just one example from leading CLS authors: even the possession of a small amount of power increases people’s willingness to engage in corrupt practices. See: David Collinson and Dennis Tourish, “Teaching Leadership Critically: New Directions for Leadership Pedagogy,” Academy of Management Learning and Education 14, no. 4 (2015): 587.

38. David Knights, “Leadership Lives? Affective Leaders in a Neo-humanist World,” in After Leadership, ed. Brigid Carroll, Suze Wilson and Joshua Firth (New York: Routledge, 2018); David Knights, “Embodied Leadership, Ethics and its Affects,” in Leadership: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (second edition), ed. Brigid Carroll, Jackie Ford, Scott Taylor, and Joshua Firth (SAGE, forthcoming).

39. Pasi Ahonen, Peter Case, and David Knights, “Leadership, Ethics and Modalities of Power,” Conference paper delivered at the 28th EGOS Colloquium, Helsinki University, Finland, July 2012.

40. Michel Foucault, “Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth,” Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 300.

41. Alison Pullen and Sheena Vachhani, S., eds., “Special Issue on The Materiality of Leadership” Leadership 9, no. 3 (2013): 315–443; Lisa Pace Vetter, “Overview: Feminist Theories of Leadership,” in Gender and Women’s Leadership: A Reference Handbook , ed. Karen O’Connor (London: SAGE, 2010).

42. For a non-colonialist view of leadership ethics, see Joanne B. Ciulla, Vincent Luizzi, and Petrus Strijdom, “Special Issue on Leadership Ethics in Africa,” Leadership 8, no. 4 (2012).

43. David Knights, “Binaries Need to Shatter for Bodies to Matter: Do Disembodied Masculinities Undermine Organizational Ethics?” Organization 22, no. 2 (2015): 200–216.

44. Alison Pullen and Sheena Vachhani, “The Materiality of Leadership,” Leadership 9, no. 3 (2013): 315–319.

45. Jesper Blomberg, “Gendering Finance: Masculinities and Hierarchies at the Stockholm Stock Exchange,” Organization 16, no. 2 (2009): 203–225; David Knights and Maria Tullberg, “Managing Masculinity / Mismanaging the Corporation,” Organization 19, no. 4 (2012): 385–404.

46. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, 2nd edition, trans. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 74.

47. See a review of 150 studies by Laura Reave, “Spiritual Values and Practices Related to Leadership Effectiveness,” The Leadership Quarterly 16, no. 5 (2005): 655–687.

48. Bruno Dyck and Elden Wiebe, “Salvation, Theology and Organizational Practices Across the Centuries,” Organization 19, no. 3 (2012): 220

49. Christopher Mabey, Mervyn Conroy, Karen Blakeley, and Sara de Marco, “Having Burned the Straw Man of Christian Spiritual Leadership, What Can We Learn from Jesus About Leading Ethically?,” Journal of Business Ethics 145, no. 4 (2017): 764. See also, for example, special issues dedicated to Spiritual, Theological and Ethical Approaches to Leadership in Journal of Management Inquiry 2005; Journal of Management Development 2010-12; Organization 2012; Journal of Personnel Psychology 2012; Chris Mabey and David Knights, ed., Leadership Matters: Finding Voice, Connection and Meaning in the 21st Century (New York: Routledge, 2018).

50. Mark Kriger and Yvonne Seng, “Leadership with Inner Meaning: A Contingency Theory of Leadership Based on the Worldviews of Five Religions,” The Leadership Quarterly 16, no. 5 (2005): 771–806.

51. A.J Ali, Islamic Perspectives on Management and Organizations (Cheltenham and Northhampton: Edward Elgar, 2005); Rafik I. Beekun and Jamal A. Badawi, Leadership: An Islamic Perspective (Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 1999).

52. Charles C. Manz, Karen P. Manz, Robert D. Marx, and Christopher P. Neck, The Wisdom of Solomon at Work: Ancient Virtues for Living and Leading Today (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2001).

53. Chris Mabey, Mervyn Conroy, Karen Blakeley and Sara de Marco, “Having Burned the Strawman of Christian Spiritual Leadership, What Can We Learn from Jesus about Leading Ethically?” Journal of Business Ethics (2016). Published online February 17, 2016. doi: 10.1007/s10551-016-3054-5.

54. Emma Bell and Scott Taylor, “Uncertainty in the Study of Belief: The Risks and Benefits of Methodological Agnosticism,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 17, no. 5 (2014): 544.

55. Kostas Amiridis, “The Shadow of Sophocles: Tragedy and The Ethics of Leadership,” Business Ethics Quarterly 28, no. 1 (2018): 15–29.

56. Ibid., 24.

57. Rita Gardiner, “Ethical Responsibility – An Arendtian Turn in Leadership Ethics,” Business Ethics Quarterly 28, no. 1 (2018): 31–50.

58. Ibid., 46.

59. Ibid., 47.

60. Iain Munro and Torkild Thanem, “The Ethics of Affective Leadership: Organizing Good Encounters Without Leaders,” Business Ethics Quarterly 28, no. 1 (2018): 51–69.

61. Ibid., 61.

62. Ibid., 62.

63. Carl Rhodes and Richard Badham, “Ethical Irony and the Relational Leader: Grappling with the Infinity of Ethics and the Finitude of Practice, ” Business Ethics Quarterly 28, no. 1 (2018): 71–98.

64. Ibid., 76.

65. Ibid., 89.

66. Ibid., 92.

67. For a three-volume reference work with a number of primary sources in this area, see Joanne B. Ciulla, Mary Uhl-Bien, and Patricia H. Werhane, eds., Leadership Ethics, (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2013).