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The Shadow of Sophocles: Tragedy and the Ethics of Leadership

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2017

Kostas Amiridis
Kostas Amiridis*
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
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Abstract:

This article explores how the idea of tragedy can highlight some of the complex and paradoxical aspects of the relationship between ethics and leadership. First, it offers a comparative analysis of the way in which questions of leadership are addressed as a practical and theoretical concern when leaders are confronted with situations of moral crisis. The context is provided by a critical reading of the MBA oath, a student-led pledge that tries to establish a higher moral standard for leaders, and by Norman Bowie’s attempt to develop a Kantian theory of leadership. Second, it introduces a novel philosophical approach based upon Hegel’s interpretation of tragedy and ethical life developed in his theory of aesthetics. Through the idea of tragedy, the concept of ethical leadership could also encompass those ambiguous situations when good conflicts with good and when a possible reconciliation of a moral conflict might require the sacrifice of otherwise legitimate ends.

Keywords

managementmoralityMBA oathBowienormativeHegel
Type
Special Section
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 15 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2017 

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References

NOTES

1. Andrew R. Sorkin, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System and Themselves (New York: Viking, 2009), 311.

2. Ibid., 535.

3. Les Coleman, The Lunacy of Modern Finance Theory and Regulation (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 112.

4. Sorkin, Too Big to Fail, 454.

5. William D. Cohan, House of Cards: How Wall Street’s Gamblers Broke Capitalism (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 328 (italics in the original).

6. Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe (London: Little, Brown, 2009), x (italics in the original).

7. Raghuram Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten The World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: Allen Lane, 2010).

8. Roger Lowenstein, The End of Wall Street (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 198.

9. What is particularly interesting in moments of crisis is that they accentuate a condition first identified by Boltanski and Thévenot: “What is problematic in businesses is that they encompass resources that are heterogeneous in terms of their mode of coherence and the underlying principle of justice on which that coherence is based. In the business context, situations that are juxtaposed in time or place are justified according to a variety of principles; thus business offers a good context for bringing to light the various ways in which the different worlds make objects available for use in justification.” The authors describe this condition as “a clash between orders of worth.” A clash between “orders of worth” is the underlying principle of tragic conflict. On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 151, 134 (italics in the original).

10. Aristotle, Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

11. Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); David F. Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Martha Nussbaum, “The Costs of Tragedy: Some Moral Limits of Cost-Benefit Analysis,” The Journal of Legal Studies 29 (2000): 1005–1036.

12. It would be almost impossible to provide a comprehensive list within the strict economy of a journal article. An abridged version, arranged alphabetically, might include works such as: Michael E. Brown and Marie S. Mitchell, “Ethical and Unethical Leadership: Exploring New Avenues for Future Research,” Business Ethics Quarterly 20 (2010): 583-616; Michael E. Brown and Linda K. Treviño, “Ethical Leadership: A Review and Future Directions,” The Leadership Quarterly 17 (2006): 595–616; Melvin T. Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Joanne B. Ciulla, ed., Ethics, the Heart of Leadership (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004); Joanne B. Ciulla, The Ethics of Leadership (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2002); Joanne B. Ciulla, Mary Uhl-Biel, and Patricia J. Werhane, eds., Leadership Ethics (London: Sage, 2013); Katherine A. DeCelles and Michael D. Pfarrer, “Heroes or Villains? Corruption and the Charismatic Leader,” Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies 11 (2004): 67–77; Gabriel Flynn, ed., Leadership and Business Ethics (New York: Springer, 2008); Mick Freyer, Ethics and Organizational Leadership: Developing a Normative Model (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); David Knights and Majella O’Leary, “Leadership, Ethics and Responsibility to the Other,” Journal of Business Ethics 67 (2006): 125–137; Mitchell J. Neubert, Dawn S. Carlson, K. Michele Kacmar, James A. Roberts, and Lawrence B. Chonko, “The Virtuous Influence of Ethical Leadership Behavior: Evidence from the Field,” Journal of Business Ethics 90 (2009): 157-170; Terry L. Price, Understanding Ethical Failures in Leadership (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Linda K. Treviño, Laura P. Hartman, and Michael E. Brown, “Moral Person and Moral Manager: How Executives Develop a Reputation for Ethical Leadership,” California Management Review 42 (2000): 128–142; Linda K. Treviño, Michael E. Brown, and Laura P. Hartman, “A Qualitative Investigation of Perceived Executive Ethical Leadership: Perceptions from Inside and Outside the Executive Suite,” Human Relations 56 (2003): 5–37.

13. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. Sir Thomas Malcolm Knox, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010).

14. Max Anderson and Peter Escher, The MBA Oath: Setting a Higher Standard for Business Leaders (New York: Portfolio, 2010) Kindle Edition, 7.

15. Ibid., 259 (bold in the original).

16. Boudewijn de Bruin, “Pledging Integrity: Oaths as Forms of Business Ethics Management,” Journal of Business Ethics 136 (2016): 23–42. According to the author, an oath consists of three main elements: the “beneficiaries,” the “core principles,” and “norms and values.” The analysis in this section focuses on the core principles rather than the beneficiaries that can be conceptualised from the perspective of stakeholder theory.

17. Ibid., 33.

18. The classical formulation of the principle of utility can be found in: Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government with an Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), 126.

19. Norman E. Bowie, “A Kantian Theory of Leadership,” Leadership & Organization Development Journal 21 (2000): 185–193.

20. Richard P. Nielsen, “Bowie’s Kantian Capitalism and the Financial Crisis,” in Commerce in the Kingdom of Ends: Essays on Kantian Themes in Business Ethics, eds. Dennis G. Arnold and Jared D. Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Richard, P. Nielsen, “Bowie’s Kantian Capitalism, high-leverage finance capitalism and the Great Depression,” in Kantian Business Ethics: Critical Perspectives, eds. Denis G. Arnold and Jared D. Harris (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2012), 76. Bowie introduces some general principles that can protect the financial sector from a future crisis: “Our experience show there are three valuable and overarching ethical principles that can be applied to the majority of issues in the financial services: (1) avoid deception and fraud, and (2) honor your commitments. (3) fulfil the true purpose of your professional role.” Business Ethics in the 21st Century (New York: Springer, 2013), 164.

21. Norman E. Bowie, “A Kantian Theory of Meaningful Work,” Journal of Business Ethics 17 (1998): 1083–1092. See also: Norman E. Bowie, Business Ethics: A Kantian Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999).

22. Bowie, “A Kantian Theory of Leadership.”

23. Bowie argues: “The leader should enhance the autonomy of his or her followers. At the extreme the leader transforms followers into leaders. The leader drives leadership down through the organization by making people at lower levels in the hierarchy decision-maker leaders themselves rather than mere followers … The Kantian leader teaches followers to become leaders.… Rather, the Kantian leader seeks to increase the autonomy and responsibility of followers so that they in turn become leaders in their own right.” “A Kantian Theory of Leadership,” 191–192.

24. Bowie argues that “Kant’s moral philosophy … is basically egalitarian” and sets for himself the following task: “given these egalitarian commitments, how can Kant provide a theory of leadership when ‘leadership’ has connotations of elitism and hierarchy?” “A Kantian Theory of Leadership,” 185.

25. Ibid, 190.

26. For example, would it be possible to think of a crime committed out of duty?

27. Phillip V. Lewis, “Defining Business Ethics: Like Nailing Jell-O To A Wall,” Journal of Business Ethics 4 (1985): 377.

28. For a systematic critique of masculine binary constructions in relation to organisational ethics see, David Knights, “Binaries Need to Shatter for Bodies to Matter: Do Disembodied Masculinities Undermine Organizational Ethics?,” Organization 22 (2015): 200–216. Also, Hemming has sought to explore the relationship between tragedy and gender in an attempt to think of sexuality beyond certain perfromative taxonomies of power (“Thinking Being Together. The Politics of Us: Justice for The Errors of the Past,” unpublished manuscript, February 23, 2016.).

29. Bowie, Business Ethics: A Kantian Perspective, 174.

30. Ibid., 174.

31. Robert C. Solomon, Ethics and Excellence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 166–167 (italics added).

32. Ibid., 259 (italics added).

33. Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1954).

34. Solomon, Ethics and Excellence, 259–260 (italics added).

35. Robert Solomon, Spirituality for the Sceptic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

36. Szondi’s history of the philosophy of the tragic begins with Schelling’s Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, written in 1795, includes thinkers such as Hölderlin, Hegel, Goethe, Vischer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and concludes with Scheler’s essay On the Phenomenon of the Tragic in 1915. Whilst thinking about the tragic has a long history, he argues that “the Hegel commentary … constitutes the basis for the other interpretations, just as Hegel must be named before all others” (An Essay on the Tragic, 3). The importance of Hegel’s commentary was also identified by Andrew Cecil Bradley who pointed nearly a century earlier that “since Aristotle dealt with tragedy, and, as usual, drew the main features of his subject with those sure and simple strokes which no later hand has rivalled, the only philosopher who has treated it in a manner both original and searching is Hegel.” Oxford Lectures On Poetry (London: Macmillan & Co., 1919), 69.

37. Hegel’s understanding of the tragic dialectic of ethical life is rooted in his interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone.

38. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1162.

39. Ibid., 1196.

40. Ibid., 1198.

41. Ibid., 1212.

42. Ibid., 1214.

43. Ibid., 1161.

44. Ibid., 1197.

45. Ibid., 1216.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., 1215.

48. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 152.