Practical wisdom: A virtue for leaders. Bringing together Aquinas and Authentic Leadership

Abstract

In leadership, we see morality and immorality magnified, which is why the study of ethics is fundamental to the study of leadership" (Ciulla, 2012, p. 508). The financial crisis and the many corporate scandals that rocked the first decades of the new millennium have placed an unequivocal emphasis on the frailty of a modern and global economic system that is characterized by the short-sightedness of profit at-all-costs (Nielsen, 2010) together with a lack of moral integrity among financial agents (Santoro & Strauss, 2012) and business leaders (Antonacopoulou & Bento, 2018; Crossan et al., 2017). This system might also be the product of managerial education (Akrivou & Bradbury-Huang, 2015; Podolny, 2009), which has a tendency to set apart and tolerate actions performed in a company setting that would be considered deplorable in the normal behavioral sphere (Haran, 2013). Many business schools prepare their students for leadership roles with an uncritical or narrow pursuit of managerial technique, looking to the natural sciences to explain certain organizational

Virtue and virtuousness in organizations: Guidelines for ascribing individual and organizational moral responsibility

“…To integrate inner aspects of virtue, such as character and reasons for action, theoretical and empirical research could take into account, for instance, issues related to individual motivations for ethical behavior in the workplace and see how these fit with the Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition. Furthermore, the role of phronesis in the individual and organizational conditions for moral responsibility needs to be investigated, given its central role in the virtue ethics tradition and its growing relevance for leadership decision‐making in business and organization studies (Akrivou & Scalzo, 2020; Ames et al., 2020; Bachmann et al., 2017; Ferrero & Sison, 2014; Ferrero et al., 2020; Diez Gómez & Rodriguez Córdoba, 2019). A robust account that connects the concepts of virtue and virtuousness with each other needs to integrate each of their characteristics without dismissing or losing their important features (Sison & Ferrero, 2015).…”

“…The end of virtue and virtuous action is moral goodness (NE, 1115b, 14; 1120a, 25), and “we deliberate about things that are in our power and can be done” (NE, 1112a). For both meanings of deliberation, practical wisdom is highly relevant, enabling the right choice not only of the ends worth pursuing but also of the best means to achieve such ends according to human good (Ferrero et al., 2020; Morales‐Sánchez & Cabello‐Medina, 2013). As a result, the condition for deliberation involves the individual being able to evaluate the significance of his own action relative to the purpose being pursued.…”

The Real Deal: A Qualitative Investigation of Authentic Leadership in Irish Primary School Leaders

“…To tackle this discrepancy, Cooper, Scandura and Schriesheim [34] proposed the need for a theoretically based definition of authentic leadership through the identification of key dimensions. In attempting to identify these key dimensions, Ferrero et al [35] then proposed a framework based on Thomas Aquinas' virtue of ethical wisdom [36], encapsulating four characteristics, i.e., self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing and internalized moral perspective (Table 1).…”

Wisdom capital: definitions, meaning and a two-level model

“…"Therefore, what sets wisdom apart from practical intelligence is its orientation toward the maximization of a common good, rather than individual well-being." Ferrero et al (2020) Decisionmaking "Practical wisdom guides us in choosing the right thing to do in the here and now, in the million varied, complex, messy situations we find ourselves in on a day-to-day basis. .…”