The Moral Leader

Challenges, Tools and Insights

Sandra J. Sucher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134146055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Successful leaders at any level and in any arena are inevitably presented with moral and ethical choices. This unique and innovative textbook is designed to encourage students and managers to confront those fundamental moral challenges, to develop skills in moral analysis and judgment, and to come to terms with their own definition of moral lea

Module III
Moral Leadership

■ Moral Leadership Module Map

Chapter 13

Moral Leadership Preview

TWO MONTHS after fire burned down his mill, [Malden Mills owner Aaron] Feuerstein the businessman was vying for time with Feuerstein the growing local and national phenomenon, the executive with a heart in an era of short-sighted profit-taking and callous disregard for workers.

Publicity over his decision to rebuild in battered Lawrence and to pay workers idled by the Dec. 11 fire had been unrelenting, and all good: Prime coverage on major networks, a gushing profile in People magazine, guest of President Clinton for the State of the Union Address. Strangers were sending him money; kids at a local McDonald’s wanted his autograph.

But back at the mill – behind closed doors – his top managers in mid-February were grappling with what they saw as a harsher reality.

A third of the mill’s 2,320 Lawrence workers were still out of jobs, but all were being paid. Feuerstein had put off limits any layoffs or consolidations to shave labor costs, but debts were mounting. And his remarks on “social responsibility” and a newfound eagerness to debate such issues were making managers nervous.

“Aaron,” his top executive, Howard Ackerman, half-joked, “have we become a nonprofit organization?

” Everybody had an uneasy laugh. No, Feuerstein assured his managers, he was not running a nonprofit textile mill.

But he was not about to let go of the one positive thing to come out of the fire: Widespread recognition of Malden Mills as a special company.

More, he was growing into the role of famous person – and liking it. And the more he read and was exposed to the views of others, including US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, the more convinced he was that too much of corporate America had grown shortsighted and anti-worker.

“I think we’re going to win in the long run because of this,” he told his managers, noting his liberal pay and other pro-worker policies had won support for the rebuilding project from bankers, government officials, suppliers and many of his customers.

But the short run was proving to be a nightmare. Behind the honors and headlines, Feuerstein the businessman was being forced to dig in hard.

The Boston Globe, September 9, 1996

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The challenge of moral leadership

After having examined moral challenges and moral reasoning in the previous two modules, we now have the opportunity to relate these insights directly to the subject of leadership. What is moral leadership? What does it look like? What distinguishes it from leadership in general, and even from effective leadership?
After all, history is full of leaders who may have been effective as judged by their ability to mobilize people, resources, and ideas, yet are widely held to have been pursuing immoral goals or utilizing morally repugnant means to achieve their intended ends.¹

One straightforward definition of moral leadership might be: Directing a morally acceptable or laudable cause, sustained by means that are also widely recognized to be moral. The Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist Robert Coles wrote to this effect, saying that “moral leadership [is] intellect calling upon the energies of conscience, with the loyalty of others a signal that such a call has been contagiously successful.”² By this measure, Ernest Shackleton, with his deep sense of responsibility and the overwhelming loyalty of his crew, was a widely successful moral leader.

However, one need not lead a team to survival in the face of near-certain death to exhibit moral leadership. Leaders confront moral challenges of various types and of varying levels of complexity on a regular basis – these challenges range from the difficult task of earning the right to be a leader, to the equally arduous task of navigating the resulting power imbalances with those being led. Leaders will face right-versus-wrong challenges, right versus right challenges, challenges posed by new principles, and so forth; how a leader reasons through and acts in these difficult situations will affect many more individuals than just the leader herself. This is what places the subject of leadership firmly within the moral domain; and, indeed, leaders, like Aaron Feuerstein in the opening vignette, are often judged – among other criteria – on the basis of the perceived morality of their actions.

Exercising authority

Studies of primates (such as chimpanzees and gorillas), as well as children and adults in laboratory settings, have demonstrated that conferring authority and establishing a hierarchy of roles is an innate group activity, especially when the group is required to make a coordinated effort at solving a problem.³ “Authority provides orientation,” writes Ronald Heifetz, instructor and author on the topic of leadership, “which in turn diminishes stress and provides a hub of cohesive bonding as each member develops some tie” with the leader. In humans, moreover, it has been shown that authority is not automatically conferred on a member who has a formal institutional claim on a top-ranking position; indeed, it can be attained by those without formal designation to a leadership role⁴ – a phenomenon we will examine in American Ground, William Langewiesche’s account of the “deconstruction” or cleanup of the World Trade Center site in New York following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Although a naturally occurring phenomenon, and a beneficial one when exercised responsibly, the exercise of authority has moral significance. For example, how leaders obtain their authority and what they do with it – that is, what they do with the sometimes vast power and resources they have at their disposal – are more than just practical considerations; they are questions of a moral nature.

Machiavelli’s The Prince, the first reading in this module, has served as a handbook for leaders and aspiring leaders for centuries precisely because it seeks to delineate the boundaries of when and how a leader should seek to act when exercising authority.⁵ The first half of his treatise focuses on the often turbulent process of attaining power, while the second half provides more general advice on how to maintain it. Machiavelli’s prescriptions offer a stark reminder of the moral responsibilities that leaders must navigate as they exercise their power.

Aside from considerations of power and the moral complications it may entail, leaders must also make constant decisions about the ends they seek and the means they use to obtain them. A later reading describing President Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan will vividly illustrate the wide-ranging effects that a leader’s choices in exercising authority may have. In conjunction with excerpts from the political commentator Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, the account will allow us to examine the moral judgments that are applied to leaders’ choices of various ends and means, and to the ways that they balance the harms they inflict and the benefits they confer on others.

Earning legitimacy

“Legitimacy” commonly refers to the perceived right of a person, group, or organization to exercise power based on a broad consensus among those over whom power is held. Leadership necessitates a connection between leaders, who assert their authority to lead, and followers; effective leadership is demonstrated when those who follow accept the legitimacy of the leader’s assertion of authority.
John W. Gardner, a seasoned author on the topic of leadership, prefers the word “constituent” over “follower” to illustrate vividly the nature of this relationship. “Leaders,” he writes, “are almost never as much in charge as they are pictured to be, followers almost never as submissive as one might imagine.”⁶

The authority to lead is a “conferred power to perform a service,”⁷ and as such it can be given and taken away. When it is given, “constituents” do so as part of a two-way exchange. Although social scientists have offered various models to explain the exercise of leadership and authority,⁸ authority is, in essence, based on a social contract between the leader and the led: “Given your know-how, I give you the power to make decisions to accomplish a service, and I’ll follow those decisions as long as it appears to me that they serve my purposes.”⁹

How does a new leader go about earning legitimacy? Max Weber, the late-nineteenth-century sociologist and philosopher, argued that a leader’s legitimacy could have one of three sources: rational-legal, that is, a codified set of organizational rules and laws; traditional, that is, an uncodified and more amorphous consensus about “the way things have always been”; or charismatic, which derives from the personality and properties of the leader herself. In the modern world, although the traditional and charismatic elements are still essential, the rational-legal source of legitimacy has perhaps become most important.¹⁰

Another useful way of viewing legitimacy is to distinguish three overlapping types of legitimacy, any of which a leader may or may not possess. Procedural legitimacy, like Weber’s rational-legal category, refers to the legal or institutional means by which a leader can be formally recognized; this may be by organizational appointment, through an election, following an established process of heredity, and so forth.

Technical legitimacy, a second type, flows from a leader’s demonstrated capacity for leadership. Leaders who have technical legitimacy are viewed as being able to fulfill their end of the tacit social contract between leader and constituent. An individual may have full procedural legitimacy, but still be unable to lead because he lacks technical legitimacy – his constituents do not have faith in his abilities to lead them in the task at hand.

Finally, we might consider moral legitimacy to be equally important. Thucydides, the classical Greek historian, judged a historical leader by writing that: “His way of life made him objectionable to everyone as a person, and thus [the Athenian people] entrusted their affairs to other hands.” Because leadership is based on a two-way relationship, leaders are indeed judged in the moral domain about the decisions they make while building and exercising their authority.

What does moral legitimacy look like, and what is its effect? In this module we will read Joseph Conrad’s short story The Secret Sharer, in which the turbulent process of attaining legitimacy is co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Preparation
• Module I Moral Challenge
• Module II Moral Reasoning
• Module III Moral Leadership
• Appendix I Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress “Moral Theories”
• Appendix 2 Truman and the Bomb
• Appendix 3 Ben Bradlee “Pentagon Papers”
• Appendix 4 Bibliography on Moral Leadership