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Moral Leadership in a Postmodern World

March 30, 2006 

"There was a time, not long ago, when Enron, Kenneth Lay, and Jeffrey Skilling were Olympian symbols of successful leadership.  Now, a few short years later, the leaders of Enron have come to represent self-serving executive greed, excess, and arrogance at their worst.  Ironically, Enron was proud of its corporate code of ethics and Ken Lay, the son of a Baptist minister, was widely regarded as a deeply religious man.  How does a company founded on values-based leadership become an exemplum of corporate moral indifference?

We are a nation of privatized morality that places corporate and civic leaders in a labyrinth of uncertainty when they try to establish a moral foundation for actions and decisions affecting the public interest.  This uncertainty is compounded by an Enlightenment tradition of modern secular pluralism privileging rational discourse as the vehicle of public moral sentiment.  In this longstanding intellectual tradition, reason is the highest good (Plato, Aristotle), the defining feature of human subjectivity (Descartes), the foundation of human freedom (Kant, Hegel, Locke), and the path to moral truth (Kant). 

Leadership, the exercise of social power, is fundamentally a moral endeavor.  There is an escapable moral dimension to the exercise of power, whether or not it is formally acknowledged.  Effective leaders are able to engage with others in building by example and constructive effort, an environment within which individuals and groups are free and encouraged to discern and actualize the right and the good in fulfillment of shared goals, values and purpose.  The nomenclature of 'ethics' and 'morality' in philosophy is rooted in the etymology of each word in Greek and Latin referring to culturally referenced customs or dispositions of character.  Since Kant and Hegel, ethics has been generally understood by moral philosophers to address questions of the Good while morality addresses questions of the Right and Just (Fraser, 2000).

In an increasingly complex and pluralistic world, it can be difficult for individuals to discern a moral center - and even more difficult for collective enterprises to achieve a meaningful sense of moral solidarity.  Leaders of corporations, communities, and nations hesitate to speak confidently in a single, authoritative 'corporate' voice; the public voices of corporate enterprises are expected to project the values and interests of the diverse stakeholders who constitute them.  Yet, as the American citizenry grows more divers, opinion polls reflect increasingly centrist values and it becomes less and less likely that corporate enterprises will have meaningful collective conversations about vital moral issues and concerns.  A pluralistic stakeholder environment presents an extraordinary challenge to leaders hoping to unite people in a shared identity and purpose drawn from experience of widely divergent private moral traditions. 

American moral thought is rooted in the ambivalence and paradox of a culture that is at once stridently secular and passionately religious.  The historical circumstances creating this tenuous truce between the secular and sacred are logical enough.  American mythic history valorizes the driving passion of religious outcasts and their search for religious toleration and freedom.  When the vast majority of Americans were protestant Christians, the porous boundary between the civic and private was not problematic.  The religious character of civic space first became problematic when atheists began to challenge the distinctly Christian character of civic space as a breach of their rights of conscience.  Within a new understanding of public religious participation, minority religious groups also began to claim their fair share of civil religious participation.  While very few would advocate a return to civic religion, the alienation of spirituality from civic life undermines the civic solidarity necessary for development of a robust and rigorous public morality (Connolly, 1999). 

The spiritual reclamation of civic space does not imply, as may be feared, the public endorsement of sectarian or religious privilege.  The following definition of morality is proposed to include a spiritual dimension without privileging religion: A framework of vision, values, practice, and performance that defines and shapes character, especially in the conditions of danger, risk, and uncertainty.  This definition incorporates research findings of social and natural sciences regarding human moral systems and judgments to challenge assumptions that moral judgment is primarily a rational endeavor. 

Spiritually engaged leadership can build moral solidarity by enabling the integration of intellectual, affective, material, and social elements of collective morality.  The unique qualities of symbol systems, elasticity and adhesion, are vital to their effective use in building moral solidarity in diverse stakeholder environments.  Elasticity and adhesion are the 'stretch' and the 'glue" of human social meaning.  Elasticity is an indicator of responsiveness and flexibility.  Adhesion is an indicator of attachment. 

Human beings depend on their societies for their sense of moral meaning.  Human self-understanding includes two primary dimensions: identity and agency.  Identity, the understanding of who one is, is based not only on our actual characteristics and capabilities, but also on how these characteristics and capabilities are interpreted and assigned meaning in a culture.  Agency, the understanding of what one does, is similarly based on both our natural attributes as well as how these attributes are culturally interpreted. 

The terminology of the Moral Compass model intentionally decouples religion from morality and allows for diverse interpretations of the spiritual dimension of morality, both religious and nonreligious.  The model also includes a cognitive dimension to accommodate moral theory as well as concrete dimension focused on moral practice and performance.   This moral compass theory has been part of the curriculum of the MBA program at Johns Hopkins University.

The individual and society.  The individual exists within a social field of communities and cultures.  The intention to represent the reflexivity of the individual and the social body: Individual morality as socially constructed and social morality as constituted by individual moral agents.  Moral identity and agency.  Moral identity and agency are represented in the model as both individual and collective understanding of moral consciousness and the capacity for mal choice and action.  The physical and the metaphysical.  From the moment of birth (and before), the meaning of the human encounter with the world is mediated through the physical body.  This encounter is further mediated and interpreted by thought and feeling.  Spirituality and rationality.  The Moral Compass differentiates two hemispheres of morality, spiritual and rational.  While this categorization may not adequately reflect the complexity of the experiential fields of meaning and may also appear dualistic, it does serve the analytical purpose of managing complexity in a way that corresponds to the integrity of the inquiry.   Vision.  Moral vision is the spiritual, and affective aspect of moral identity oriented towards the power of myth, narrative, and representation as an intuitive anchor of moral identity.  Values.  A value system is the rational aspect of moral identity.  Practice.  Moral practice is the spiritual aspect of individual and collective moral agency; it is ritualized action that expresses and reflects the vision and values of moral identity.  Performance.  Performance is the rational aspect of moral agency. 

The Moral Compass provides a moral framework that invites spiritual engagement free of dogma or sectarianism.  Spiritual engagement enables people to build organizations and communities where personal moral identity is aligned with the moral identity of the organization.  The Moral Compass nurtures a public passion for goodness  (Thompson, 2004, p. 27-37).

Reference:  Thompson, L.J. (2004).  Moral leadership in a postmodern world.  Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1. 

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Created: 2007-08-28, Updated: 2009-02-17