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Journal of Business Ethics (2009) 88:525536 Springer 2009 DOI 10.1007/s10551-009-0117-x
Business Leadership: Three Levelsof Ethical Analysis Daniel E. Palmer
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.
KEY WORDS: authenticity, leadership studies, moral character, respect, responsibility, telos, virtue theory
Leadership studies is a well-established eld of business research, and much effort has been put into delineating the nature and characteristics of leadership in the business world (see, Antonakis et al., 2004; and Weber, 1997). For most of the history of leadership studies, researchers focused primarily upon empirical questions concerning the nature of leadership: questions concerning the characteristics possessed by successful leaders or various models of leadership style (Antonakis et al., 2004). The aim of such research could be summarized in terms of the attempt to achieve a better understanding of what makes for effective leadership. However, as Joanne Ciulla points out, much less attention was paid in the literature to the ethics of...