Abstract
Research on the normative aspect of leadership is still a relatively new enterprise within the mainstream of leadership studies. In the past, most academic inquiry into leadership was grounded in a social scientific paradigm that largely ignored the ethical substance of leadership. However, perhaps because of a number of public and infamous cases of failure in business leadership, in recent years there has been renewed interest in the ethical side of leadership in business. This paper argues that ethical issues of leadership actually arise at number of different levels, and that it is important to distinguish between various diverse kinds of ethical issues that arise in the study of leadership. The three levels identified are the level of the individual morality of leaders, the level of the means of their leadership, and the level of the leadership mission itself. We argue that only by fully understanding all of the different levels of ethical analysis pertinent to business leadership, and the distinctive kind of issues that arise at each level, can we fully integrate normative studies of leadership into the field of leadership studies. As such, this paper offers a model that incorporates three different levels of ethical analysis that can be used to study normative issues in leadership studies. Such a model can be used to better understand and integrate ethical issues into research, teaching, and training in leadership.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the participants of the 15th International Symposium on Ethics, Business, and Society at the IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain, for a number of comments and suggestions that were helpful in preparing the final draft. I would also like to thank Professor Alejo Sison of the University of Navarra, who read a complete draft version of the paper, as well as two anonymous reviewers of a manuscript draft, for their insightful comments and criticisms. Responding to their concerns has helped me to clarify my own thoughts on several of the ideas discussed in the paper and, hopefully, improved my presentation of them in a number of respects.
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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 15th International Symposium on Ethics, Business, and Society at the IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain.
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Palmer, D.E. Business Leadership: Three Levels of Ethical Analysis. J Bus Ethics 88, 525–536 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-009-0117-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-009-0117-x