Moral Implications of Leadership - Transformative Insights

Authors

  • Feng Xu School of Business Administration Georgia Southwestern State University Americus, GA 31709
  • Cam Caldwell
  • Verl Anderson School of Business and Communications Dixie State University St. George, UT 84770

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18533/ijbsr.v6i3.940

Keywords:

Commitment, Kohlberg’s six-stage moral development, morality, transformative leadership.

Abstract

In this paper we examine the correlations between Lawrence Kohlberg’s six stages of morality and Transformative Leadership, a new morally-based approach to leadership. Using survey of students, faculty members, and staffs at a South Florida private university we present evidence that there is a clear relationship between an individual’s self-described leadership perspectives and the stages of Kohlberg’s moral development model. Our paper provides five significant contributions to the literature about leadership and its moral role and enables scholars and practitioners to understand more completely the relationships between leadership and moral behavior.

References

Agresti, A. (2010), Analysis of Ordinal Categorical Data, 2nd ed., Wiley, New Jersey.

Agresti, A. and Finlay, B. (2009), Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences, 4th ed., Prentice-Hall, New Jersey.

Bass, B. M. (1998), Transformational leadership: Industrial, military, and educational impact, Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ.

Baucus, M. S. and Beck-Dudley, C. L. (2005), “Designing ethical organizations: avoiding the Long-term negative effects of rewards and punishments”. Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 56 No. 2, pp. 355-370.

Bennis, W. and Nanus, B. (2007), Leaders: Strategies for taking charge, 2nd ed., Harper-Collins, New York.

Block, P. (2013), Stewardship: Choosing service over self-interest, 2nd ed., Berrett- Koehler, San Francisco, CA.

Brady, F. N. (1999), “A systematic approach to teaching ethics in business”, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 19 No. 3, pp. 309-318.

Brown, M. E. and Trevino, L. K. (2006), “Ethical leadership: a review and future directions”, Leadership Quarterly, Vol. 17 No. 6, pp. 595–616.

Callahan, D. (2004), The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead. Mariner Books, New York.

Caldwell, C. (2012), Moral Leadership: A Transformative Model for Tomorrow’s Leaders. Business Expert Press, New York.

Caldwell, C., et al. (2012), “Transformative leadership: achieving unprecedented excellence”, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 109 No. 2, pp. 175-187.

Caldwell, C. and Hansen, M. (2010), “Trustworthiness, governance, and wealth creation”, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 97 No. 2, pp.173-188.

Cameron, K. S. (2011), “Responsible leadership as virtuous leadership”, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 98 No. 1, pp. 25-35.

Cameron, K. S. and Winn, B. (2012), “Virtuousness in organizations”, In K. S. Cameron and G. M.Spreitzer (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship, pp. 231-243. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Collins, J. (2008), “Celebrity leadership”, Leadership Excellence, Vol. 25 No. 1, p. 20.

Collins, J. (2001), Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. Harper Collins, New York.

Conger, J. A. and Kanungo, R. N. (1998), Charismatic Leadership in Organizations. SAGE Publications, Los Angeles.

Covey, S. R. (2004), The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness. Free Press, New York.

Covey, S. R. et al. (1999), First Things First: To Live, to Love, to Learn, and to Leave a Legacy. Simon & Schuster, New York.

Donaldson, T. and Dunfee, T. W. (1999), Ties that Bind: A Social Contracts Approach to Business Ethics. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.

Dubrin, A. (2013), Handbook of Research on Crisis Leadership in Organizations. Edward Elgar original Reference, Northampton, MA.

Gilligan, C. (1993), In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.

Grant, A. M. (2012), “Leading with meaning: beneficiary contact, prosocial impact, and the performance effects of transformational leadership”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 55 No. 2, pp. 458-476.

Havard, A. (2014), Virtuous Leadership: An Agenda for Personal Excellence. Scepter Publishers, New Rochelle, New York.

Hayibor, S. et al. (2011), “Value congruence and charismatic leadership in CEO-top manager relationships: an empirical investigation”, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 102 No. 2, pp. 237–254.

Hosmer, L. T. (2011), The Ethics of Management: A Multidisciplinary Approach, 7th ed., Richard D. Irwin, New York.

Jackson, R. et al. (2013), “The dissolution of ethical decision-making in organizations: a comprehensive review and model”, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 116 No. 2, pp. 233-250.

Keith, K. M. (2012), The Case for Servant Leadership, 2nd ed., Terrace Press, Chicago, IL.

Kohlberg, L. (1981), Essays on Moral Development, Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Moral Development, Harper & Row, San Francisco, CA.

Kouzes, J. M. and Posner, B. Z. (2011), Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose it, Why People Demand it. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

Kracher, B. and Marble, R. (2008), “The significance of gender in predicting the cognitive moral development of business practitioners using the sociomoral reflection objective measure”, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 78 No. 4, pp. 503-526.

Lennick, D. and Kiel, F. (2007), Moral Intelligence: Enhancing Business Performance and Leadership Success. Wharton Business School Publishing, Upper Saddle River, NJ.

Lewis, C. S. (1980), Mere Christianity. Harper Collins, New York.

Lussier, R. N. and Achua, C. F. (2013), Leadership: Theory, application, and skill development, 4th ed., South-Western, Mason, OH.

Minnameier, G. (2006), “Measuring moral progress”, Journal of Adult Development, Vol.16 No. 3, pp. 131-143.

Moroney, S. K. (2006), “Higher stages? Some cautions for Christian integration with Kohlberg’s Theory”, Journal of Psychology & Theology, Vol. 34 No. 4, pp. 361-371.

Parris, D. L. and Peachey, J. W. (2013), “a systematic literature review of servant leadership theory in organizational contexts”, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 113 No. 3, pp. 377–393.

Pava, M. (2003), Leading with Meaning: Using Covenantal Leadership to Build a Better Organization. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

Pfeffer, J. (1998), The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.

Reed, D. C. (2008), “A model of moral stages”, Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 37 No. 3, pp. 357-376.

Reed, D. C. (2009), “A multi-level model of moral functioning revisited”, Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 38 No. 3, pp. 299-313.

Sachdeva, S. et al., “Culture and the quest for universal principles in moral reasoning”, International Journal of Psychology, Vol. 46 No. 3, pp. 161-176.

Schein, E. A. (2013), Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. Berrett-Koehler, New York.

Senge, P. M. (2006), The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization. Crown Publishing, New York.

Solomon, R. C. (1992), Ethics and Excellence: Cooperation and Integrity in Business. Oxford University Press, New York.

Warrick, D. D. (2011), “The urgent need for skilled transformational leaders: integrating transformational leadership and organization development”, Journal of Leadership, Accountability, & Ethics, Vol. 8 No. 5, pp. 11-26.

Weber, J. (1991), “Adapting Kohlberg to enhance the assessment of managers’ moral reasoning”, Business Ethics Quarterly, Vol. 1 No. 3, pp. 293-318.

Downloads

Published

2016-04-16

Issue

Section

Article