The Anatomy of Ethical Leadership

Lyse Langlois

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781926836355
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Performance at all costs, productivity without regard to consequences, and a competitive work environment: these are the ethical factors discussed in The Anatomy of Ethical Leadership, which highlights issues in workplace culture while looking into a brighter future for labour ethics. Langlois maintains that an enhanced awareness of the process of ethical decision making in difficult situations will lead to the establishment of practices that encourage productive relationships between co-workers. Will the twenty-first century be marked as an era leading to a healthier work environment? The Anatomy of Ethical Leadership aims to serve those in human resource management and those concerned with practical work ethic.

Chapter 1 Modernity

An Instrumental Rationality

In order to understand the rise of ethical leadership properly, we must first focus on the period known as the managerial revolution, which, at the time, presented a specific concept of the way in which individuals should be managed within organizations. Inspired by the positivist paradigm, this revolution ensured a vision of rationality based exclusively on the economy. James Burnham announced the advent of this managerial revolution in 1941, which he claimed marked the end of the domination of capitalists, who would be replaced in the economic sphere by managers. In The Managerial Revolution, Burnham heralded the beginning of the era of rationalization that would usher in a form of planned social relationships within organizations. A series of management tools were then developed to allow managers to exert more effective control over individuals in their organizations and to improve performance at work in order to increase productivity. This is how utilitarian instrumentalism entered human resources. However, this approach, which is still in effect today, has proved to have weaknesses that have become increasingly evident to researchers (March and Simon 1958; Foster 1980; Greenfield 1981).

Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (originally published in 1962), was one of the first to highlight the cracks in the model developed in modern times, namely the positivist paradigm.¹ Positivism, as developed by André Comte-Sponville, postulated that individuals could free themselves from certain preconceived notions that bound them to illusions that obstructed their understanding of things.

The Impact of Descartes and Kant on the Concept of Free Will

By taking a step further into the past, we discover that we owe to René Descartes (1596−1650) the idea of freedom of thought, liberated from suppositions and myths. With his famous cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), Descartes would play a major part in this flow of ideas by adding reflexive consciousness to the notion of the free subject. Immanuel Kant (1724−1804) followed this trajectory by stating that enlightenment "is the human being's emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is the inability to make use of one's own understanding without direction from another. This minority is self-incurred when its cause lies not in a lack of understanding but rather a lack of resolution and courage to use this without direction from another" (Kant 1996 [1784], 17).

Descartes provides a rational basis for the concept of a universal source of knowledge founded on the mathematical model, thereby establishing the epistemological standard of science. For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770−1831), Descartes is the philosopher-founder of modernity and of a rationality freed from superstition. Reason was to express itself by way of scientific knowledge, by postulating the equality of all men² and the existence of free will and autonomy, and by demanding democracy as a way of governing oneself.

This concept was to reach its climax and have an impact on society as a whole with the advancement of the sciences. The epochal element of the positivist vision was to attempt to reduce all phenomena to a single causality and to attribute neutrality to these same phenomena in the name of scientific rationality. Questions that explore the why, namely, those that attempt to explore the root causes of things, are excluded from this vision. The main questions are limited to the how, that is, to questions formulated in terms of the laws of nature, often expressed in mathematical language. Through observation and repeated experience, this form of questioning is intended to identify relationships underlying observed phenomena that can explain the reality of facts. In some ways, this cult of reason follows a rational process of highly instrumental induction. This superstructure, which profoundly influenced Western thought and the Anglo-Saxon world, culminated in a paradigmatic revolution that was largely accepted until its re-examination in the 1960s.

Paradigm Shift: Towards Postmodernity

The work of Kuhn, among its other merits, highlighted the mental models that governed the thinking of scientists. Because they are based exclusively on mathematical thinking, these models exclude certain axioms that are required for a full understanding of reality. Indeed, the positivist model does not explain everything and, in particular, ignores the search for meaning. The re-assessment of the positivist model has not, however, led to the disappearance of this conception of rationality, which is still present in the form of neo-positivism. It is currently being put to the test against the complexity of today's world. A positivist spirit subsists in certain habits of thought and in the structures that this trend put into place. Its legacy can be seen in the technical, legal, and administrative rationality that directs our relationships with others, as well as our way of thinking. Reasoning exclusively oriented towards this type of rationality results in fragmented and restrictive thinking that lacks any understanding of interdependency. Why, then, should we be surprised by our difficulties in finding new solutions for today's ills? The re-examination of the positivist model clearly demonstrates the limitations of such reasoning (see Senge and Gauthier 1991; Morin 1999; Argyris and Schön 1996).

Rationality: Caught Between Two Worlds

We are forced to observe that the presuppositions initially excluded from the positivist vision, as well as the spiritual and axiological dimensions, sometimes reappear in the form of major crises that society must bear.³ These missing dimensions—the return of the spiritual, the rise of ethics, and the place of values—return full force, raising numerous questions and stirring debate. For many people, these non-mathematical dimensions are annoying because they are difficult to understand and control. Rather than initiate a dialogue on these aspects of life, we neglect them or find ways to camouflage them in the name of technical rationality. These dimensions cannot be expressed as equations, however; they call on another form of logic, one that includes tensions and paradoxes. One of our present challenges is that of responding to ethical questions raised particularly by advancing biotechnologies and by environmental concerns. This ethical questioning manages to impose itself while also causing us to lose our bearings somewhat; the divide between the why and the how becomes increasingly complex and uncertain.

To illustrate this way of thinking, we can take the case of an organization. It is easier to define an organization by what it does—its behaviour, its function, its procedures (namely the how)—than by what lies beyond the public veneer—its internal structure, its relationships, its interactions, its overall purpose (in other words, the why). It is rare to find descriptions of organizations that pertain to modes of adaptation, to connections, and to suitability in terms of context and environment because such things resist the logic of a simple causal explanation. Addressing these other dimensions allows for an examination of the organization that takes into account its multifinality and the complexity of reality.⁴ About reality, Paul Watzlawick states:

Everyone develops an idea of the real. In scientific and political discourse, in everyday discussions, we defer to the supreme referent in the final analysis: reality. But where is this reality? And more importantly, does it really exist? Of all illusions, the most perilous consists in believing that there is only a single reality. In fact, there are different versions of reality, some of which are contradictory, and all of which are by-products of communication, rather than the reflection of objective and eternal realities. (1976, 41)

This complexity of the real highlights the various levels of organizational reality. The first of these is the physical or material level of being, of facts and of objects. This first level is that of objective reality, visible and quantifiable. The second level, or the social level, which derives from the former, is a psychic reality devoted to meanings and value and to organizing the categories and systems of the preceding objective reality. A fact becomes an event only by its effects and repercussions in people's minds. This same fact is recorded in the organizational memory. The third level, or the cultural level, relates to the symbolic reality of beliefs and rules that direct and delimit the meanings and value of objective reality. This level distinguishes true from false, normal from pathological, beautiful from ugly, acceptable from unacceptable, and just from unjust. Of course, bureaucratic reality must be added to these realities, in which the real is recorded in official documents.

The complexity thus generates a certain diversity, in the form of distinctive levels of reality, and sparks off a variety of structural arrangements and behaviours. This complexity, very much in evidence today, distinguishes itself from a binary vision in which contrasts reign. We are located here in universes that are sometimes hard to measure—that emerge in a sort of flux and in contrasts that are more or less capable of being reconciled. These universes exist side by side, sometimes sitting rather uneasily with one another. Often a single point of view is privileged, namely, that of financial viability.

Vincent de Gaulejac (2005) focuses attention on this vision that permeates organizations. Most managers go to extremes in their pursuit of financial viability, in their need to please shareholders as well as safeguard their own positions. They find it easy to switch from a mode of administration that treats people like human beings to one that considers human resources to be entirely at the service of the enterprise, much like any other type of resource or raw material. This concept destroys the meaning of any human action that attempts to open itself up to other rationalities.

Organizations that apply such logic should not be surprised to see the commitment of their employees lessen to a similarly utilitarian level, one of purely contractual relations with the business. This situation cannot persist without repercussions to the health and families of the workers. We have only to consider the increasing number of cases of professional exhaustion, a malaise often associated with increasing workload and with a significant loss of purpose, as well as with a decline in the feeling of belonging, manifested in wavering loyalty to the organization. These symptoms reflect the priorities that large businesses most often privilege. Such businesses dictate a certain vision of how organizations should be run, one that denies complexity. As a result, a sort of apathy has set in, destroying the ability of employees to use their own judgment. It is sometimes surprising to observe the extent to which individuals become paralyzed by a lack of principles with which to explain decisions. They can become very dependent on the judgment of the board of directors or of the organizational hierarchy itself. This is not to incite organizational delinquency, but there does appear to be a sort of generalized inability to think for oneself, an inability that can be produced by a lack of criteria for judgment. In a study carried out in one of the major private sector engineering companies (Lamonde et al. 2007), I noticed a certain caution when it came to ethical dilemmas and the question of which decision to take. As a matter of routine, validation had to pass along the hierarchical path. Engineers were often given great decision-making latitude; in times of difficulty, however, this seemed to diminish, as the hierarchy did not allow individuals the freedom to exercise their ability to judge. This can be explained, in part, by the desire for a consistent and standardized set of practices, which essentially demands that one exercise a sort of lowest-common-denominator reasoning, one that disregards the specific contexts in which people function.

Table 1, taken from de Gaulejac, highlights the main paradigms being promoted in managerial theories and by schools of administration, which guide behaviour in the workplace. This managerial power, which de Gaulejac criticizes so forcefully, has a manipulative range in accordance with terms acknowledged and accepted by all. He very rightly points out that we have moved from disciplinary power to managerial power, from control of the body to the mobilization of desire, from set working hours to an unlimited investment of one's self, from following orders to commitment to a project (2005, 83–87). From this critique of the managerial power that prevails in our organizations, we cannot leave out the direction given to leadership that, now yoked to this power, exists to serve a neoliberal ideology. Writing about global financial markets, in which companies now find their performance constantly scrutinized by investors, Pierre Bourdieu comments:

Subjected to this permanent threat, the corporations themselves have to adjust more and more rapidly to the exigencies of the markets, under penalty of "losing the market's confidence," as they say, as well as the support of their stockholders. The latter, anxious to obtain short-term profits, are more and more able to impose their will on managers, using financial directorates to establish the rules under which managers operate and to shape their policies regarding hiring, employment, and wages. Thus, the absolute reign of flexibility is established, with employees being hired on fixed-term contracts or on a temporary basis, and repeated corporate restructurings and, within the firm itself, competition among autonomous divisions as well as among teams forced to perform multiple functions. Finally, this competition is extended to individuals themselves, through the individualisation of the wage relationship. (1998, 3)⁵

Table 1: Main Paradigms in Administration

Paradigm	Basic Principle	Mode of Critique
Objectivist	To understand is to measure, to calculate	Logic based on the primacy of mathematical language above all other languages
Functionalist	The organization is a given	Logic that obscures the issues of power
Experimental	The objectification of the individual is a guarantee of the primacy of the scientific	Logic based on instrumental rationality
Utilitarian	Reflection is at the service of action	Logic subjected to the knowledge of the criteria of usefulness
Economist	The individual is a factor in the enterprise	Logic based on reducing t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Robert J. Starratt
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Modernity
• Chapter 2: Ethical Leadership: The Anglo-Saxon Understanding
• Chapter 3: The TERA Model: Towards an Ethical, Responsible, and Authentic Trajectory
• Conclusion
• Appendix: TERA—A Guide to Developing a Multidimensional Ethical Conscience
• References