Thesis-2008-Fryer.pdf (11.87 MB)
Morality and leadership in work organizations: developing a normative model
thesis
posted on 2018-08-07, 14:13 authored by Michael FryerLeadership is a morally ambivalent notion. While leaders of organizations may have the
capacity to do a great deal of good, they can also do a great deal of harm. Furthermore, there
is something intuitively disconcerting about the idea of individual leaders exerting
disproportionate influence over other people. My objective in this PhD is to develop an
understanding of what moral leadership might look like. I approach this question through a
number of different avenues. I begin by reviewing the leadership literature to see what it has
to say about morality. In particular I consider the extent to which the literature, in responding
to the moral concerns mentioned above, either ameliorates or exacerbates those concerns. I
then consider moral leadership and from the perspective of ethical theory. Taking a
representative cross-section of different meta-ethical stances, I consider the implications that
principle-based, existentialist and inter-subjectivist theory might hold for moral leadership.
Lastly, I attempt to find out what some leaders have to say about morality. Using semi-structured
discussions with sixteen people who hold formal leadership roles in large
organizations, I identify a number of themes that characterise the way that they think about
the ethical dimension of leadership.
I draw out the implications of the perspectives that emerge from each of these separate
avenues of enquiry, also highlighting relationships between different perspectives. I take the
view that each of these perspectives offers some positive insights into what moral leadership
might comprise but that each may also lead to some troubling ramifications. While a simple
template for moral leadership is likely to remain elusive, sensitivity to the positive and less
positive implications of these various perspectives will enable a more enlightened response to
the ethical challenges presented within different leadership contexts. I conclude that an
intersubjectively facilitative style will be better placed to respond to the moral challenges
presented by leading in organizations than will more monological or oligarchic approaches.
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Publisher
© Mick FryerPublisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2008Notes
A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy at Loughborough University.Language
- en