تصورسازی مجدد رهبری اخلاقی به عنوان رهبری برای اهداف والاتر  Re-imagining ethical leadership as leadership for the greater good

1. Introduction As Western nations slowly emerge from the recent global recession, there is demand among citizens for authorities to practice, and be seen to practice, ethical leadership; to demonstrate that the individual and organizational roots of ethical misconduct, historical and prospective, are being identified and remedied. Witness, for example, the recent pledge by Mark Carney (2015), the Governor of the Bank of England, to end the irresponsible practices that have gripped the financial sector. Consistent with this yearning for leadership in the public interest, recent years have witnessed a flurry of research into ethical leadership. Prominent among these studies is authentic leadership (George, 2003; Luthans & Avolio, 2003; Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, & Peterson, 2008), which persists in the popular and, to some extent, academic imagination as exemplary ethical leadership, despite limited empirical support (see, e.g., Gardner, Cogliser, Davis, & Dickens, 2011) and questionable assumptions about what makes people ‘tick’ (see, e.g., Ford & Harding, 2011; Sparrowe, 2005). In this research note, we contend that leadership scholars ought to move away from authenticity and towards ethicality as the subject of study and, consistent with recent remarks by Chia (2014), Hernes (2014), and Tourish (2015), we propose that pausing to interrogate core assumptions of ethical leadership, rather than executing yet another technically proficient but conceptually thin study of it, would have a salutary effect on our understanding of our quarry. The project of interrogating core assumptions is, of course, well underway, yielding new insights into the relational, contextual, and political dimensions of ethical leadership (see Liu, 2015; for a review). Concomitant with these developments is the emerging view that ethical leadership is best understood and theorized as a social practice, which provides an affordance for examining how complex ethical tensions, dilemmas, and paradoxes are apprehended and addressed in the practice of ethical management and leadership (Cherry, 2014; Clegg, Kornberger, & Rhodes, 2007). Although the relevance of paradox to management, organization, and leadership studies is well established (Lewis, 2000; Quinn & Cameron, 1988; Smith & Berg, 1987), overtly paradoxical conceptualizations of management and organization that are alive to the complexity, ambiguity and liquidity (Bauman, 2000, 2007) of contemporary capitalism are relatively rare (but see Lavine, 2014; Smith, Besharov, Wessels, & Chertok, 2012; Smith & Lewis, 2011). Overtly paradoxical conceptualizations of leadership, where leadership is defined as the processes through which people are persuaded to assume collective responsibility for solving shared problems (Grint, 2010a), are rarer still.