Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Volitional and Cognitive Accounts of Ethical Failures in Leadership
- 2 The Nature of Exception Making
- 3 Making Exceptions for Leaders
- 4 Justifying Leadership
- 5 The Ethics of Authentic Transformational Leadership
- 6 Change and Responsibility
- 7 Ignorance, History, and Moral Membership
- Works Cited
- Index
5 - The Ethics of Authentic Transformational Leadership
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Volitional and Cognitive Accounts of Ethical Failures in Leadership
- 2 The Nature of Exception Making
- 3 Making Exceptions for Leaders
- 4 Justifying Leadership
- 5 The Ethics of Authentic Transformational Leadership
- 6 Change and Responsibility
- 7 Ignorance, History, and Moral Membership
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
In Act 1, Scene 3 of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Polonius councils Laertes: “This above all, to thine own self be true …” Polonius's endorsement of authenticity is certainly no stranger to the leadership literature. Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, for example, tell us that “[l]eaders acquire and wear their visions like clothes. Accordingly, they seem to enroll themselves (and then others) in the belief of their ideals as attainable, and their behavior exemplifies the ideas in action.” Similarly, Gilbert Fairholm claims that “[t]he leader's task is to integrate behavior with values,” and Ronald Heifetz encourages “[a]daptive work … to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face.” John Gardner, in his book On Leadership, articulates the ethic behind the Shakespearean dictum this way: “One of the tasks of leadership – at all levels – is to revitalize those shared beliefs and values, and to draw on them as sources of motivation for the exertions required of the group.” On each of these views, leadership puts behavior in line with values so that we might be true to ourselves.
Even the most influential moral treatise in the field, James MacGregor Burns's Leadership, can be read as an argument about the kinds of selves to which leaders should be true. “That people can be lifted into their better selves,” Burns tells us, “is the secret of transforming leadership…” In fact, it is the possibility of this kind of transformation that gives leadership its moral purpose.
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- Understanding Ethical Failures in Leadership , pp. 123 - 146Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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