As we noted in the introduction to the first of our two special issues, we embarked on this project because we wanted to encourage a more philosophical approach to the study of ethics in leadership studies.Footnote 1 We argued that ethics and leadership are intimately intertwined; ethical action in groups, organizations, and society is difficult unless leadership of some collective or communal shape or form is exercised, and it is often precisely the ethics, rather than the efficacy, of action that generates the greatest problems. For the field of leadership ethics to flourish, it must develop a stronger philosophical foundation to balance and complement the growing empirical literature in this area.Footnote 2 Hence, we hope to encourage philosophers to write about key issues of leading and leaders, and leadership scholars to engage more with philosophical concepts and literature.
In our previous introduction, we discussed some of the ethical challenges that have confronted leadership throughout the ages. These included problems related to conflicts between a leader’s self-interest and the interests of followers, the dirty hands problem, and the tension between the need for leaders to be both effective and ethical. Our first introduction also explored the nature of responsible leadership, and how ethics may not necessarily be the outcome of conscious intentions but sometimes just happenstance or moral luck. In addition to these topics, we examined the ethical conundrums and potentialities of power and we noted the problems faced by women and others that can arise from masculinized, white, heterosexual concepts of leadership. Lastly, while we did not publish any articles on spirituality, we acknowledged the burgeoning literature on religion, spirituality, and leadership, and the growing number of organizational scholars who question secular ethics as the prevailing norm in the study of leadership and management.Footnote 3
The papers in this issue zero in on some of the themes discussed in the first introduction that are related to the self, dirty hands, and leaders’ responsibilities to followers. Plato writes about the importance of self-knowledge and self-development for understanding the nature of the ‘good’ or anything else for that matter. For example, in the Phaedrus (230-230b) Socrates says, “I can’t as yet ‘know myself,’ as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, and so as long as ignorance remains, it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters.”Footnote 4 Foucault, too, is interested in the relationship between the self and ethics, engaging with Socrates and Plato to place self-knowledge within a broader ethical project of self-care. Foucault, like many other philosophers, argues that we must gain mastery over ourselves and reject all domination including enslavement to our own desires and this can engender not only a philosophical, but also a spiritual, mode of being.Footnote 5 In a similar vein, Confucius writes: “If a man (the ruler) can for one day master himself and return to propriety, all under heaven will return to humanity. To practice humanity depends on oneself.”Footnote 6
Machiavelli also understands the challenges that the obligations of leadership create for the morality of leaders. He takes us into the heart of the dirty hands problem because he understands that sometimes there is a personal ethical cost that leaders pay to carry out their obligations to followers—they must learn how not to be good.Footnote 7 When leaders fail to do this in dirty hands situations, people in organizations and societies pay the price. We often regard the idea that the ends justify the means as a recipe for bad behavior, but Machiavelli compels us to consider the alternative to this when people’s lives are on the line.
Habermas’s work also focuses on the responsibilities of leadership and the social order of a different kind—one that is based on consensus. His extensive work on discourse and communicative reasoning offers a means for acknowledging and tolerating people’s differences, building consensus, and bringing them together.Footnote 8 Habermas’s approach offers leaders a way to minimize or prevent some types of dirty hands problems. Leaders can avoid harming one group to help another by bringing different groups and interests together. These are just a few examples of how philosophical literature can shed light on our understanding of ethics in leadership.
THE ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE
Drawing on the works of Plato, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas, the authors of the four articles in this issue use the work of these philosophers to offer new insights into some key issues in leadership ethics. It seems apt to begin with Plato, since so much of Western ethics defines itself in relation to Plato, whether by developing his ideas for contemporary application or challenging them to offer a contrasting view. In our first paper, David Bauman presents an analysis of five leadership types, based on Plato’s virtue ethics in the Republic.Footnote 9 The optimal model for leadership is the philosopher-king, whose primary motivation is wisdom. The philosopher king is followed by four progressively less virtuous types: The timocrat, who is motivated by honour and victory; the oligarch, who is focused on wealth; the democrat, for whom freedom is the highest good; and finally, the tyrant, who is driven by power, lust, and luxury. This taxonomy of leadership is set against the backdrop of the Platonic notion of the ideal state and, by extension, the ideal organization, in which the task of ethics is to discover the essence of virtue. As Bauman argues, “a philosopher-leader could ask, ‘what is the true good, as opposed to the CFO’s opinion of what is good?’ Seeking the true nature of ‘good’ is what philosopher-leaders do.”Footnote 10 From the Platonic perspective, people have different natures, which make them more or less suitable for leadership; albeit that this true nature is nurtured, developed and honed through years of experience, training, and reflection. An emphasis on self-discovery is thus at the core of leadership ethics, creating a foundation for development and selection programmes for current and future leaders. In this view, the key questions for leaders are: Who am I? Whom do I want to become? And how do I become that person?
In our next paper, Christopher Cosans and Christopher Reina take us to the heart of the dirty hands problem, suggesting that the challenge for leaders is to try to find the least bad of several bad options.Footnote 11 Their analysis is explicitly contrasted with the Platonic view, and it insists that we must focus on what actually happens in the real world, rather than in the sphere of abstract idealism. In this real world, leaders are faced with constraints, threats, and quandaries, which require an ethics of compromise, rather than of excellence or perfection. The authors seek to rehabilitate Machiavellian philosophy from its misleading associations with evil and psychopathy. Indeed, they offer us a mischievous assessment of how poorly Machiavelli himself would have scored on the Mach IV personality scale, highlighting the distortions that have crept into both popular and psychological operationalizations of his work. Machiavelli’s The Prince offers “not a rejection of morality altogether, but a moral theory that accounts for moral dilemmas, where something bad happens no matter what one does.”Footnote 12 The choice, therefore, is not between good and bad, but between two bads; and the leadership challenge is to evaluate a situation realistically and pragmatically before deciding upon the lesser of two evils. Echoes of these ideas are traced in contemporary notions of distributed, contingent, and situational leadership, and in the dynamics of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power. From this perspective, leadership ethics is grounded contextually, socially, and historically, permitting a reevaluation of Machiavelli in terms of his understanding of social duty and the moral imperative to defend the social order against lawlessness and corruption. This emphasis on Machiavelli’s subtlety, nuance, and irony suggests a leadership ethics guided by a pragmatic assessment of the possibilities, priorities, and limitations of leaders’ real-world experiences.
An emphasis on limitations is also a central feature of our next paper, where Donna Ladkin draws on Foucault to propose that ethical leadership requires a process of self-constitution.Footnote 13 She argues that the relationship between power, knowledge, resistance, and freedom is crucial for our understanding of leadership ethics. This is not power in the traditional hierarchical sense; instead, Foucauldian disciplinary power is one that controls behaviour, attitudes, and identities through practices of surveillance and normalisation. From this perspective, we are all embedded in disciplinary regimes, which limit our capacity to act with full autonomy over our actions. The challenge, accordingly, is one of self-constitution, that is, of fashioning oneself into an ethical subject in order to embrace the freedom to act ethically. This involves striving to loosen the stranglehold of prevailing orthodoxies and things we just take for granted—those “invisible cages which hold expectations in place and which can limit manoeuvrability.”Footnote 14 It requires critical self-reflection to expose one’s own instincts, tendencies, and blind spots—in other words, to overcome oneself through self-mastery. And finally, it demands an understanding of the networks of power, within which power and resistance are inextricably interwoven. In this view, the ethical endeavour involves anticipating resistance and limitations; and challenging the way such constraints initially seem inevitable. Notwithstanding its critical tenor, this is a vision of hope. As Ladkin concludes, “through the process of self-constitution and the type of alertness it fosters, the fissures, the cracks, the loosening of what is self-evident can be grasped and grappled with. And it is this grappling, this unwillingness to accept ‘what is’ without interrogating its claims, which fosters the freedom essential to ethical agency on the part of not just leaders, but of us all.”Footnote 15
Our final paper sees the responsible leader as someone who fosters relationships and facilitates dialogue with and between stakeholders. Moritz Patzer, Christian Voegtlin, and Andreas Georg Scherer draw on Habermas to reconfigure the scope of business ethics and urge reconciliation between corporate and societal interests.Footnote 16 They invoke philosophy to tackle the challenges of our age, which is characterized by increased globalization, multiculturalism, mass migration, and diversity, alongside a hardening of national and religious ideologies and identities. They explore the practice of stakeholder relations as a crucial element of leadership that offers the possibility of greater social integration based on the articulation and understanding of the values of a shared lifeworld. The lifeworld is the domain of informal, lived experience—unregulated by the market—wherein the values of family, culture, relationships, and meaning guide our attitudes and actions, often unconsciously. As the authors suggest, “the more an issue touches upon aspects of a shared lifeworld, the more it requires a communicative action orientation and a higher degree of participative decision making.”Footnote 17 Stakeholder engagement thereby becomes more than the superficial seeking of sign-off on programs which are already formulated; it is the attempt to solicit genuinely participative decision making, deliberation, and debate. Leadership ethics is thus a profoundly communicative endeavor wherein “responsible leaders become conscious initiators and moderators of stakeholder dialogues.”Footnote 18 Communicative reasoning encourages a greater tolerance of difference than strategic reasoning, with its narrower focus on specific goals and outcomes. It moves towards the possibility of consensus and a sense of collective ownership of decisions. At the heart of this proposition is the notion of values, not as some homogenizing corporate initiative, but as a means of acknowledging the interests, concerns, and sources of meaning that bring us together as human beings, rather than those which drive us apart.
CONCLUSION
The philosophical works that underpin the articles in this special issue prompt further inquiry into the nature of ethics in leadership, with powerful implications for the question of where ethical leadership comes from and why leaders fail to be ethical. With Plato, we have an emphasis on self-discovery, which focuses our attention on the basic psychologies of different leadership types. This stands in contrast to Foucault, who emphasises the more dynamic and social notion of self-formation rather than self-discovery, and encourages us to consider the processes of critical self-reflection through which one can fashion oneself into the sort of person who makes ethical decisions and takes ethical action. Self-constitution also informs Habermas’ philosophy, which suggests that ethical leadership can be talked into existence, and that the responsible leader is first and foremost a communicator. And with Machiavelli, we see the ethical agent as one who is able and willing to compromise and make pragmatic assessments of the real-world challenges that arise.
The articles in this issue evidence the potential of philosophy to deepen our understanding of leadership and ethics. Along with those in our first special issue,Footnote 19 they offer researchers and scholars a richer understanding of the complex ethical challenges of leadership. One of the great ironies of leadership is that when a country, a business, or an organization runs smoothly, we pay little attention to the ethics of its leaders; however, when things go wrong, we are compelled to do so. With these two special issues, we call for leadership to be interrogated from an ethical point of view, regardless of whether things are going well or badly. Leadership ethics is a relatively new area of applied ethics that promises to offer insights into leadership that will be useful for understanding how to better promote ethical leadership and prevent unethical leadership. We hope that the articles in both issues expand the interest of the journal’s readers, catalyzing new contributions that draw on philosophical perspectives from a variety of academic and cultural traditions.Footnote 20
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We received a large number of submissions for the special issues and most could not be published, but we are grateful to all who submitted, as well as to the many reviewers who offered their assistance, criticism, and encouragement to a wide range of authors. We also appreciate the advice provided by the journal’s editors that helped us bring these two issues to fruition.
