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“What Does Ethics Have to do with Leadership?”
Jacqueline Boaks and Michael Levine
Journal of Business Ethics (forthcoming) http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/
applied+ethics/journal/10551
Overview
• The Received Wisdom
• Statement of the problem
• 4 ways leadership talk goes wrong
• Possible way to ground leadership and ethics: – Can we treat leadership as a simple virtue? – Broadly Aristotelian account
Leadership and Ethics – The Received Wisdom
The Received Wisdom
… the definition question in leadership studies is not really about the question “What is leadership?” It is about the question “What is good leadership?” By good, I mean morally good and effective. This is why I think it’s fair to say that ethics lies at the heart of leadership studies.”
Joanne B. Ciulla
‘Leadership Ethics: Mapping the Territory’, Business Ethics Quarterly, vol.5, no. 1, 1995, p. 17.
“Leaders worthy of the name, whether they are university presidents or senators, corporation executives or newspaper editors, school superintendents or governors, contribute to the continuing definition and articulation of the most cherished values of our society. They offer, in short, moral leadership.”
John Gardner, ‘The Antileadership Vaccine’
Leadership and Ethics – The Problem
Statement of the Problem
• Is there a conceptual link between leadership and
ethics? • By implication – can we answer the Machiavellian
skeptic? • Despite myriad accounts of ethics in leadership, the
relationship between ethics and leadership is a blind spot in almost all of them.
• Machiavelli, The Prince: • “a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for
which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion.”
• “Returning to the question of being feared or loved, I come to the conclusion that, men loving according to their own will and fearing according to that of the prince, a wise prince should establish himself on that which is in his own control and not in that of other”
• “Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.”
The Machiavellian Skeptic
Why Should We Care?
• Leadership is one of the dominant ideas of our time.
• And yet, no agreed definition.
• Most works on leadership start with acknowledging the lack of clear definition.
• So what can we know about leaderships’ relation to ethics?
Why Should We Care?
• A lot rides on our answer to the question of whether we have good reason to think leadership and ethics coincide.
• Answering what Ciulla succinctly refers to as “the Hitler problem”).
• The Machiavellian skeptic. • If there is no such link, we should want to know why
we often think there is.
The Alternative: Give Up?
• The alternative? Just give up on a connection between leadership and ethics?
• Concedes too much. Bernard Bass, leadership just influence: – “the production of a change in circumstances achieved via
a change in perceptions and motivations of followers” (Bernard M. Bass, ‘Concepts of Leadership’, in Bass and Stodgill’s
Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Application).
4 Mistaken Ways
There are four unsuccessful ways in which the literature on leadership tries to demonstrate that leadership and ethics are linked. None of these ways are successful yet each seems to get part of the solution correct: 1. Values Accounts 2. Character Accounts 3. Observer Bias 4. Stipulative Accounts
First Mistaken Way: Values
• Values are a major locus of talk about leadership • But values are not all there is to leadership. • And - which values? Shouldn’t leadership require the
right values?
Values • Which values? At times in the popular accounts it seems
to be enough that the leader has values.
• E.g. in talk of ‘managing meaning’: – DePree, for example, tells us that “the first responsibility of
the leader is to define reality” and then achieve ‘momentum’ amongst followers to achieve the ‘vision’ articulated by the leader. (Depree, ‘What is Leadership?’)
– For Smircich and Morgan leaders “shape and interpret
situations into a common interpretation of reality” as “an important foundation for organized activity.” (“Leadership: The Management of Meaning” in The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science)
Accounts of leadership with objective, correct values as central
• Endorsable moral values. • MLK, Gandhi etc. Leader as moral reformer. • Not (just) ‘managing meaning’. It matters that
Lincoln was (we think) right to convince others that slavery should end. We endorse those goals, if retrospectively.
• Pathway metaphors. Progress.
What’s Wrong with the Values Accounts of Leadership and Ethics?
• These accounts, even when they specify ethical
values over other values, are vacuous. • Apart from an account of objective value, of what is
right and good, such accounts fail to distinguish leadership from mere influence.
Second Mistaken Way: Character
• Addresses one of the concerns we have – that leaders be ‘authentic’.
• Part of what is at play in the concept of leadership is that it is not just a skilled deployment of authority or power – the ‘leader’ is someone worth admiring.
• But in fact a focus on character isn’t enough to ground leadership in ethics.
• Even if we accept good character as necessary:
– ‘Good’ in what sense? – Why is good character essential? – On what grounds?
• Doesn’t address the Machiavellian denial or explain what the connection is.
Third Mistaken Way: Observer Bias
• Familiar to a lot of us, common to much of our thinking about leaders.
• From the individuals who come to mind when we think about who is a paradigm case of a ‘leader’.
• Leaders, followers, the rest of us all primed for this conclusion.
An Example
• James Kouzes: the common characteristic of those most named as admired leaders is that of “strong beliefs about matters of principle”. (Hitler problem?) Common approach. Leaders like Lincoln all have, or had, unwavering commitment to a clear set of values.
• But his conclusions don’t follow from his evidence. • In fact it may be more constitutive not of the leadership but of
the admiration.
Fourth Mistaken Way: Stipulative
• Through inattention, or wishful thinking, accounts can become prescriptive. Stipulate that there is a conceptual connection between leadership and ethics.
• Partly through deep seated desire that power and ethics should go together.
Ciulla’s stipulative account
• Ciulla’s understanding of leadership, of good leadership, and of leadership studies, appears to ignore the essential problem about leadership Machiavelli raises in The Prince.
• To equate leadership with morally good leadership begs the most significant question - and related questions - about the nature of leadership.
• The classic example is James Burns’s model of Transforming Leadership.
• Transforming leadership occurs when leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of morality. It is “moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led.”
Burns, Leadership, 1978
Burns – Stipulative Too
Stipulative
• But with Burns too the questions remain: – Do we have good reason for thinking this is leadership? – Wishful thinking? Or is there a conceptual link? – And what of Ciulla’s 3 ‘interlocking categories’?
Leadership for ethical ends? In an ethical way? Compatible with leader’s own ethical character?
Stipulative Account
• Far from aiding or enhancing an understanding of leadership, the supposition that ethics is intrinsic to “good” leadership, as opposed to say ethical leadership, prevents one from investigating leadership; that is leadership that is frequently unethical.
• Closes off and prevents the genuine enquiry. • It prevents it by stipulatively preventing any
coherent conceptualization of it
Leadership and Ethics – A Proposed Solution
A proposed solution
• We seem to need more to ground leadership in
ethics.
• Aristotle on ethics and human flourishing. – Eudaimonia – Excellence – Judgement
• Aristotle: – Greek philosopher 384-322BC – The system of ethics he outlined is now called ‘virtue ethics’
and is based on the idea of ‘virtues’ that serve human flourishing.
• Eudaimonia / flourishing – The particular, special kind of well-being that is a human live
that is going well. – The virtues are required for this and serve it. – Having the virtues is part of what it is for humans to flourish.
• Virtues – The set of excellences that serve human flourishing. – They involve judgment and skill, to act ‘in the right way, at the
right time, to the right amount’. – E.g. to be courageous but not foolhardy.
Terminology Check!
Nichomachean Ethics Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. But a certain difference is found among ends … Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel… that of economics wealth. But where such arts fall under a single capacity- as bridle-making and the other arts concerned with the equipment of horses fall under the art of riding… the ends of the master arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book 2 Ch. 5
Can we treat leadership as a virtue?
• It seems conceivable to think of it as an excellence of persons.
• It seems to require that the leader gets things right in a meaningful way (excellence).
• Seems to involve judgement (phronesis). • Virtue ethics also seems to offer a way to capture
the positive connotations that the word ‘leadership’ seems to have over words such as ‘power’ or ‘authority’.
Can we ground leadership in ethics?
• Proposed answer: a broadly Aristotelian account • It may be possible to think of leadership as a broadly
Aristotelian master virtue. • This gives us a way to ground the relationship
between ethics and leadership – because it serves human flourishing – and also a model of how the conceptual link between leadership and ethics works.
• On this view, leadership as a master art may be seen as the kind of excellence that is part of the set of virtues, incorporating many other virtues—perhaps different virtues at different times and in different situations--that aims overall at the ultimate good for humans. Subsuming some virtues and together with other virtues, it aims at eudaimonia.
Eudaimonia
• Eudaimonia – ‘flourishing’. • It is the end or proper goal of the master art of living
virtuously and it is also the only way, on an account such as Aristotle’s, to achieve real happiness. Paul Taylor describes it as – the good of man as man. Happiness (eudaimonia, well-
being) is the kind of life that is suitable or fitting for a human being to live, and a human being is one who exemplifies the essential nature (or essence) of man.
• There is a particular excellence or way of being that attaches to humans
• Human flourishing • Excellences • Compassion, temperance, courage etc.
• Grounding leadership in flourishing is one possible way to make sense of the claim that leadership just is ethically good leadership, and demonstrates what grounding in virtue ethics can offer to leadership studies.
• So the broadly Aristotelian gives us a way to connect leadership and ethics as well as a reason why.
• Addresses the Machiavellian challenge, and grounds the claim that ethics and leadership must go together.
• Only the virtuous agent is capable of subsuming other goals to the flourishing of followers.
• Does this set the bar too high? • What will operational leadership look like in this
context? • Does being a good leader require being a good
follower? • What of Ciulla’s three senses of good leadership:
– Leadership done in an ethical way – By an ethical person – To ethical ends?
Questions for Discussion
