Reimagining ethical leadership as a relational, contextual and political practice

Abstract

Interest in ethical leadership has been spurred by the widespread reporting of corporate malfeasance and corruption in the last decade. Although ethical leadership theories have highlighted the importance of ethical considerations in leadership, the dominant discourses of this field tend to treat ethical leadership as individualised, decontextualised and power-neutral. The purpose of this article is to address these limitations of the mainstream literature through a reimagination of ethical leadership research, development and practice grounded in a feminist, communitarian and corporeal ethic. This approach, I propose, has the potential to reorient leadership as a collective ethico-political project exercised towards the goals of equality, justice and emancipation.

This Time from Africa: Developing a Relational Approach to Values-Driven Leadership

“…Lutz 2009;Prozesky 2009). While relational leadership (Uhl-Bien 2006;Cunliffe 2009) continues to develop, both in general leadership studies (Cunliffe and Eriksen 2011), and in ethical and critical leadership studies (Maak and Pless 2006;Liu 2017;Rhodes and Badham 2018), relationality is a core feature. We believe that everyday practice in the African context precedes much of this theorization.…”

“…In this paper, we wish to further contribute to this growing body of work by focusing on African-inspired theoretical and pedagogical contributions to the area of ethical leadership development (Khoza 2006;Smit 2013), and more specifically to the importance of relationality in ethical leadership. Indeed, relational leadership is a rather recent issue both in general leadership studies (Cunliffe and Eriksen 2011), and in ethical and critical leadership studies (Maak and Pless 2006;Liu 2017;Rhodes and Badham 2018). However, relationality is a core feature and longer-standing concern of the African tradition of Ubuntu.…”

Empowering Women Through Corporate Social Responsibility: A Feminist Foucauldian Critique

“…Fourth, empowerment involves groups of people, or individuals within society acting not just as individual entrepreneurs but as social beings in cohort with others (Batliwala, 2007;Cornwall et al, 2008). This echoes discussions of relationality in business ethics and stakeholder theory, where the isolation of traditional leadership (Liu, 2017;Painter-Morland, 2008;Uhl-Ben, 2011), especially around business ethics and accountability (Freeman & Liedtka, 1997;Painter-Morland, 2006), has been critiqued for ignoring the social ties that bind us. This chimes with the critique of a neoliberal notion of empowerment which treats women as atomised entities.…”

Bringing the ugly back: A dialogic exploration of ethics in leadership through an ethno-narrative re-reading of the Enron case

“…We observe that these issues also apply to the ethical leadership literature, which has further been criticised for being too individualised, decontextualized and power neutral (e.g. Kersten, 2008;Knights and O'Leary, 2006;Liu, 2015a). We therefore challenge authorial voices in the leadership literature that polarise debates on 'good' and 'bad leadership.…”

“…In addition, we identify a third set of voices, which we term the 'relational-contextual' narrative. These scholars question the abstraction of business ethics into universal principles and codes of practice (Cummings, 2000) with its emphasis on 'objectification, rationality, and the pursuit of meta-narratives unaffected by context' (Ladkin, 2006: 89, see also Dibben et al, 2017Knights and O'Leary, 2006;Levine and Boaks 2014;Liu, 2015aLiu, , 2015bPrice, 2006). For example, Collinson's (2005) work on the relational dialectics of leadership identifies how universal principles of 'ethical' or 'toxic' leadership risks separating leaders and leadership into simplistic opposites such as 'good and bad, which as Edwards et al…”