A common reaction to crises experienced within or brought about by business is to identify a corollary ‘crisis of leadership’ and to call for better (stronger, more thoughtful or, indeed, more ethical and responsible) leaders. This paper supports the idea that there is a crisis of leadership – but interprets it quite differently. Specifically, I argue that the most ethically debilitating crisis is the fact that we look to leadership to solve organisational ethical ills. There is, I argue, a pressing (...) need to conceptualise a business ethics that is not constrained by the straitjacket of official hierarchy – a need to denaturalise ‘leadership’ as the normal or rightful locus of ethical regulation and renewal in business organisation. To this end, I explore a Levinasian ethico-politics of responsibility and proximity as the basis of an alternative, anti-sovereign, ethics of organisation. (shrink)

Conflict handling by managers gives rise to significant emotional and cognitive experiences for affected employees and has far-reaching effects on the effectiveness of a group and an organization. In this conceptual paper, we argue that despite many claims made by managers in their self-reports that they engage in either dominant or compromising conflict-handling strategies when managing conflict within a group, they may be perceived by employees as adopting neglect or avoidance behaviors. We examine how such perceived managers' avoidance styles could (...) influence employees' perceptions with regard to justice, trust, and politics within an organization. (shrink)

This paper examines love as a concept for advancing our understanding of the ethics of leadership. We draw upon writings that consider love to be at the heart of modern subjects’ search for meaning and affective attachment to organisation – necessitating, we argue, an exploration of leadership too in these terms. Existing works on leaders’ supposed love for those they lead are considered. These serve as a springboard from which to undertake a philosophical examination of two dominant formulations of an (...) ethics of love in Western culture: neighbour and agapeic love. Neither of these conceptualisations, we argue, suffice as an understanding of leadership. We draw upon Kierkegaard to highlight the category error of conceptualising leadership in terms of neighbour love, and feminist writings to highlight the deeply problematic sacrificial demand at the heart of agapeic love. Drawing attention to the plenitude of other loves yet to be explored by business ethics scholarship, we propose two organising foci for advancing our understandings: a focus on humanising love by leaders, and a focus on problematising love of leaders. (shrink)