Contemplative Leadership: The Possibilities for the Ethics of Leadership Theory and Practice

Abstract

In this paper, we offer a conceptualization of leadership as contemplative. Drawing on MacIntyre's perspective on virtue ethics and Levinas' and Gilligan's work on the ethics of responsibility and care, we propose contemplative leadership as virtuous activity; reflexive, engaged, relational, and embodied practice that requires knowledge from within context and practical wisdom. More than simply offering another way to conceptualize the ethics of leadership (e.g., what leaders ought to do), this research contributes to understanding the ethics of leadership in practice. Empirically, we analyze the narratives of those in positions of formal authority and other organizational members in churches. We illustrate contemplative leadership as driven by a good purpose, derived from the unique organizational and broader societal context in which leadership occurs, and grounded in an ethical concern for the other. Contemplative leadership accounts for the complexity of experience and is discerned in mundane and everyday practices. We conclude with the implications for leadership theory, practice, and education.

Managing organizational ethics: How ethics becomes pervasive within organizations

“…All too often, companies do not use ethical principles in culture management or in establishing a hierarchy of organizational values. For ethics to permeate the organization, the steps of culture management should incorporate ethical values in order to build ethical cultures ( Grandy & Sliwa, 2017 ).…”

Leadership: Philosophical Perspectives and Qualitative Analysis of Ethics—Looking Back, Looking Forward, Looking Around

“…The philosophical aspect of how leadership and ethics intersect is often satisfied with reference to historical and contemporary 'Greats,' such as Plato (Korabik 1990), MacIntyre (Sinnicks 2016), or Levinas and Gilligan (Grandy and Sliwa 2017). This can extend across cultures, with contributions explaining the ethical particularities of, for example, leadership in non-US (the default culture) countries such as Japan (Taka and Foglia 1994;Witt and Stahl 2016).…”

The Ethics of Affective Leadership: Organizing Good Encounters Without Leaders

“…According to Cunliffe and Eriksen, people in leadership positions may therefore respond to and take moral responsibility for others through open dialogue. Echoing these concerns, Grandy and Sliwa (2017) have suggested that embodied and reflexive engagement make leaders skilled at helping followers connect to and care for people within and beyond the organization's boundaries.…”

“…We would not dispute the importance of caring for others in society. However, this becomes problematic when it is defined as an attribute of a particular class within Business Ethics Quarterly 56 society, the leadership class, and when it neglects the apparatus of power that underpins the practice of caring (see e.g., Brown, Treviño, and Harrison 2005;Cunliffe 2009;Grandy and Sliwa 2017). The present argument does not reject an ethics of care in toto, but highlights the political pitfalls of this approach and refocuses the question of leadership ethics in terms of an affirmative Spinozian ethics, which emphasizes how people act and are acted upon in good encounters that enhance our affective powers.…”

“…The ethic of care must therefore be considered within the wider social conditions under which it is practiced and understood (Tomkins and Simpson 2015). Today the priest has been replaced by the figure of the manager-leader in current expressions of pastoral care, and it is perhaps no coincidence that one of the few empirical studies of this kind of ethical leadership was found in the pastoral work performed by “leader-priests” (Grandy and Sliwa 2017).…”