Introduction
Leadership has been defined in terms of traits, behavior, motivation, interaction patterns, role relationships or occupation of an administrative position. Most definitions reflect the assumption that it involves a process whereby intentional influence is exerted over people to guide, structure and facilitate activities and relations in a group or organization. Gary Yukl, who has studied the phenomenon for more than three decades, suggests that leadership is “the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives” (Yukl 2010, p. 26).
One viewpoint that Yukl emphasizes is that leadership occurs only when people are motivated to do what is ethical and beneficial for the organization – but he admits that leaders will more often than not attempt to merely gain personal benefits at the expense of their followers, and that, despite good intentions, the actions of a leader are sometimes more detrimental than beneficial for the followers (Yukl 2010, p. 23). This raises the question of whether there is a divisive difference between leadership and management – with the obvious conclusion that there is an overlap between the two. The overlap will be wider or narrower depending on the person who executes the position. One definition which shows this best is by viewing management as an authority relationship directed at delivering a specific routine, with leadership being a multidirectional influence with the mutual purpose of accomplishing real change (Rost 1991). But as has been pointed out by Bowie and Werhane (2004), there is an additional issue that comes into view when looking at who manages a manager. A manager typically works for another, and even top managers serve as agents, for the stockholders of a business or for the elected officers in a public administration entity. This will often draw conflicts of interest because almost every management decision has an effect on a manager’s personal situation.
Whichever way we look at leadership or management, it is always about relations between humans. Management as an authority relationship produces accomplishment of routines. While this is brought about through the interaction of humans, a management focus is more on outcome and not on the nature of this interaction. This overlaps with what we may call autocratic leadership, where a decision is made by an authoritarian manager. From there, a continuum leads through consultation and joint decision to participative leadership and delegation. However, a distinction must be made between overt procedures and disguised ones, as sometimes what appears to be participation may only be deception (e.g., when a manager solicits ideas from others but ignores them when making a decision; see Strauss 2001). This would indicate that the person acts on false pretense. That person does not act morally, which brings us to the nexus between human interaction and morality. The common term applied to this is unethical, a term that is found throughout the academic literature and in practitioners’ presentations. What is meant, though, is immoral behavior. As will be set out in the following, the terms of ethics and ethical should rather be applied to the reasoning for morality and moral. Consequently, this book will use the expression of moral and morality when talking about the nature of human interaction. Also, this book uses the term human centered management rather than human centered leadership, first because it wants to appeal to business executives at all levels, and second because when managers interact with people morally, they automatically move away from just applying compliance towards what is the essential essence of leadership, human orientation (“encouraging and rewarding individuals for being fair, altruistic, friendly, generous, caring and kind to others”; Kabasakal and Bodur (2004, p. 569).
The human centered paradigm is about leading in a manner that respects the rights and dignity of others (Ciulla 2004, speaking of human centered leaders). Leaders are per se in a position of social power. So when they use their social power in the decisions they make, the actions they engage in, and the ways they influence others (Gini 1997), they exercise human centered management. Six key attributes that appear to characterize human centered management/leadership have been identified in the literature, and this intersects with ethical leadership (an overview is given by, among others, Resick et al. 2006). The six key attributes are character; integrity; ethical awareness; community/people-orientation; motivating, encouraging and empowering; and managing of accountability. For any manager or executive to develop these attributes, he or she must become aware of their primordial importance – this can be learned and thus should always be taught first in a curriculum of any business school or university. Only then will all strives to develop leaders or positive leadership (Cameron 2012) make sense.
There is an additional aspect in the behavior-related perspective, and this regards the attempts of a leader to shape the moral behavior of others. With that in mind, Brown et al. define “ethical leadership” as the “demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making” (Brown, Treviño, and Harrison 2005, p. 120). Here, the employees’ perceptions of what followers infer on good or bad behavior from the leader’s conduct are taken into account as well. Still, while influencing others and setting good examples are prominent traits of leadership, the notion of ethical demands a more concise definition than just normatively appropriate. For one, complying with norms is just one perception; appropriate conduct towards others also entails the capacity for empathy and reciprocity, a sense of fairness and the ability to harmonize relationships, and the “internalization of others’ needs and goals to the degree that these needs and goals figure in one’s own judgment of behavior, including others’ behavior that does not directly relate” (De Waal 2006, p. 168). On the other hand, the enumeration just given only specifies how people should behave, which means to behave morally, and not why they should or will behave that way. The question of why is the subject of what philosophers call ethics, that is, the study of the grounds of human beliefs and actions. Morality covers the how question: what are the principles that govern, what are the actions that display appropriate behavior?
One way to exhibit the distinction between morality and ethics is to differentiate between the capacity to act intelligently and the grounds of beliefs/actions, which is the source of reason. When stating that “intelligence is the ability to learn about the world, to learn from experience, to make new connections of cause and effect and put that knowledge to work in pursuing one’s ends” (Korsgaard 2006, p. 113) we are with how to behave. Reason, by contrast, looks inward and asks whether actions are justified by motives or inferences from a person’s beliefs (why does the person behave in a specific way?). Moral standards/morality would then define how to relate to people, and ethics would then demand that “we treat other people as ends in themselves, never merely as means to our own ends” (as per one postulate of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant; Korsgaard 2006, p. 101).
All the definitions and postulations given previously are in some way monistic. But there is a systemic perspective in what this book calls human centered management, as it intertwines ethics, social aspects, the economic perspective and a relation to institutional concepts. Human centered management is a system as an integrated whole that is not the algebraic sum of the components, but an entity in itself, that needs to be converted into the object of analysis from all its perspectives (Jiliberto 2004). Thus, interpreting one perspective only, as is often done, weakens the systemic aspect and subsequently fails to identify relationships with problems in other fields. In accordance with the author’s objective and purpose for this book, we will start with the systemic dimension in the discussion of how to look at leadership and morality. From there we will develop the ethical, social, economic and institutional perspectives. Finally, the book concludes with a view on how ethical leadership concepts should be implemented and taught. The organization of the book, then, can be depicted as follows:
