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Business ethics as an independent academic discipline is rather young, having started only after the Watergate affair (Gini 2004:36). So it is not surprising that the first academic jour-nals concerned with business ethics only started in the early 1980s (Business and professional ethics journal, and Journal of business ethics). But the interest in business ethics continues to grow: Since the beginning of the new millenium a number of academic journals have started, some of them concerned with a specific professional field (e.g. law, or accounting), others with the global aspect of it (African journal of business ethics, Asian journal of business ethics, or Journal of international business ethics). These specific aspects are not the concern here. At this point rather, some authors shall be introduced who have specifically written about TRANSFOR

-MATIONAL LEADERSHIP and ethics.

Jane Howell was one of the first to make a clear distinction between “bad” and “good”

charismatic leaders (Howell 1989). She introduced the distinction between personalised and socialised leaders and associated socialised charismatic leaders with authentic transforma-tional leaders (:232). Personalised charismatic leaders abuse the followers’ goals. “In parti-cular, a leader’s private motives are displaced onto followers and rationalized in terms of follower interest (Burns, 1978). These personal motives may or may not coincide with

follower needs; it is the leader’s intention that predominates” (Howell 1989:223). A person-alised leader’s goals are leader-driven. In contrast to this the sociperson-alised charismatic leader’s goals would be follower-driven. S/he would act in a way that the needs of both would be fulfilled; leader and follower would be united in a common purpose. This distinction has found wide-spread acceptance with leadership scholars. And it is helpful that she does not evaluate behaviour, but looks behind the behaviour to evaluate the intention of a leader toward the followers. Taking behaviour as the deciding factor for evaluation leads one into an endless circle of discussions about what percentage of a leader’s behaviour has to be morally good so that s/he can still be considered an authentic transformational leader. In Howell’s distinction one can see the basic difference between Burns (and Greenleaf even more so) and Bass: Who is the model geared toward? Toward the leader, to make him/her successful, or toward the follower?

However, when one looks at the whole picture, another question remains: Who defines the common purpose? When TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP (and House even earlier) claims that it can “lift” the values of a follower to higher goals—who has the right to define what these higher goals should be? Is the socialised charismatic leader really oriented toward followers? According to Howell and Avolio’s description of a charismatic leader, in the process of vision development s/he would act much as one would expect of a servant leader (Howell & Avolio 1992:45). And yet, if one compares these high standards with people proclaimed as charismatic leaders one wonders why so often the leader is only oriented toward followers’ interests after the goals of the followers have been manipulated to line up with leader/company goals. Howell’s distinction goes in the right direction, but does not go far enough. And, indeed, it would be dangerous to really think this through to the end. Who would remain as a truly socialised leader? Leaders have to function between demands from many sides, and not always can the demands of an organisation be easily reconciled with the expectations of followers—let alone with a leader’s ethical responsibility toward society.

What leader could expect to be able to make the right decision all the time? A Christian leader knows that in conflicting demands his/her first responsibility is toward God and God’s purpose. This can mean that a Christian leader will not be able to promote a company’s vision if this vision, for example, pursues success at the expense of the disadvantaged.

Karl Kuhnert was another one who wrote specifically about the moral state of transforming leaders (Kuhnert 1994). His context was using delegation as a means to develop people. He distinguishes three levels of leaders: the transactional operator, who can only evaluate situations in terms of gain or loss (and who therefore has problems developing followers), the team player, who is dependent on being accepted by the group s/he leads (and who is

therefore also limited in challenging people), and the truly transformational, “self-defining”

leader, who can delegate to achieve “higher-order objectives”. These types of leaders also in his estimation correspond to three levels of moral development. Level 3 leaders might not always act on this “self-defining” level; what makes them transforming leaders is the fact that they can act on this level. With Kuhnert, similarly to Howell, one is on the one hand intrigued with the attempt to account for leadership actions in a positive way, “judging what is right or wrong in terms of balance and integration of conflicting individual, team, organi-zational, and societal interests”, and making decisions along “internal standards that are considered right or morally correct” (:20), looking for the “good of the group” (:23). However, when one considers the whole picture, one notices again, that this “good” has a very specific context, namely the achievement of organisational goals. The desire to develop people does not grow out of a respect for the dignity of a person, but rather is a result of market demands:

With fewer employees required to share greater work loads, many of these leaders have had to stretch the capacity of their human resources to keep pace with rapid changes in the market. To address these ongoing changes and to capitalize on an organization’s human assets, leaders must continu-ously develop their people to higher levels of potential. (:10)

The self-defining leader is the one who is able to convince followers that what s/he develops them to is in their best long-term interest (:23). It is certainly right to help people grow and develop, but the same is true here which has been mentioned before: If this development is driven by the necessity of our day and age where organisational success can only be reached if one goes to the trouble of developing people, then such an intention behind “development” is morally rather questionable.

Rabindra Kanungo and Manuel Mendonca published their book Ethical dimensions of leadership (Kanungo & Mendonca 1996) two years after Kuhnert’s description, and in 1998 they published a summary of their thoughts in an article in the Journal of Human Values (Kanungo & Mendonca 1998). They take Kuhnert’s explanations to a new level. Ethical leadership, they say, needs to consider the influence strategy a leader employs, the motives behind it, and the leader’s character. In their understanding ethical leadership can only be understood on the basis of altruistic motives. Therefore, while they also consider the affiliation, power, and achievement motives of a leader (see section 5.3.2.2), in each of these areas they distinguish between ethical and unethical aspects. An ethical leader would be motivated by affiliative interest (as opposed to the need for affiliative assurance¹³⁶), by an institutional power need (as opposed to personal power need), and by social achievement (as

136 Kuhnert’s team player, in contrast, would fit the description of a person with a high need of affiliative assurance.

opposed to personal achievement). Ethical leaders would use altruistic transformational influence strategies like empowerment instead of egotistic transactional influence strategies, and they would continually work on the development of their own character.

Figure 13: Ethical Leadership in three dimensions according to Kanungo and Mendonca (1998:137)

In their model it is noteworthy that they include societal interests, and one would expect that they develop this thought further, explaining what these societal interests consist of.

However, this is the point where they, lamentably, are as vague as other proponents of TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP—an unfortunate shortcoming, because if one does not specify the context in which one defines something as “good”or “bad”, ethical pronouncements tend to become rather meaningless shells. In their case, as has been seen with others, the organi-sation’s values and vision are adopted without any critical reflection as to their validity and ethical content. Leaders who do not pursue their own interest, but rather the interests of the organisation, are considered ethical leaders. Their role toward followers is then to be a model for identification, comparable to a benevolent parent.

The followers identify with the leader because of their concern that failure to do so would cause them to be detached or disconnected from the leader’s trust and nurturance that constitute the basis of their self-growth or de-velopment. [...] The child imitates the parents because they are perceived to be the epitome of all that is good and wise. Furthermore, as discussed previ-ously, the internalization process fostered by the empowerment strategy allows for a free choice by followers to subscribe to the leader’s vision, values, and goals and to adopt the related norms and behaviors. In fact, the whole point of the empowerment strategy is to enhance the followers’ self-efficacy beliefs, which then become the foundation for their self-growth and functioning as autonomous persons. (Kanungo & Mendonca 1996:69)

From a Christian ethical perspective, while the leader indeed is expected to be a model, binding the followers’ self-perception to a leader in such an unquestioning way cannot be called ethical behaviour. Rather, a Christian leader needs to be concerned with the growth of followers toward becoming mature in their own judgements of whether something corre-sponds to God’s principles (Rom 12:2) instead of just—for fear of losing the leader’s approval—

identifying with the vision the leader proclaims. While in their writing the menschenbild proclaimed speaks of the dignity of a person, of their right to grow, the relationship which they then promote for this process of growth is one where the dignity of the person is replaced again by dependence on the benevolent and wise leader.

There are other questions which remain unanswered: Does the “free choice” of the followers also include the choice to not internalise the organisation’s vision as the truth? And the even more fundamental question: Who defines the organisation’s vision? Keeley (1995)¹³⁷—quoting Madison—is very direct in his critique that what looks very “empowering”

in fact is a farce, because it is still the powerful ones that make decisions and impose what they consider the “common good” on others (:77). If the system boundaries for an organi-sation are drawn narrowly enough, then a company can easily define their goals as “right”

and “good”. In this case, TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP could definitely be defined as “good”

also, if it helps a leader to reach these “good” goals—the distinction between a socialised and a personalised leader becomes all too easy.

Another aspect should also not be forgotten: It is certainly important to apply ethical standards to the practical questions leadership is confronted with. However, as has been explained in section 2.3.2, questions in the area of applied ethics are only the last step of an evaluation process. It would be shortsighted if one did not take into consideration the normative assumptions and the basic philosophical or theological perspective from which a person applies these ethical evaluations. Ignoring them will not prevent one’s conclusion from being subject to the same kind of fallacies the underlying theory is prone to. Kanungo and Mendonca base their demands for ethical leadership (as the only way to effective leader-ship) on the premise that “the values inherent in the choice of ‘others before myself’ or

‘moral altruism’ are universal and form part of the heritage of all cultures” (Kanungo &

Mendonca 1998:138). In terms of their meta-ethical position, this is clearly a stand built on the moral sense school—which means that they also need to consider the weak point the founders of this school have pointed to: Even if altruism were a value in all societies, for what reason should an individual (or an in-group in the case of a collectivistic society) pursue this value if it was clear that this would lead to a decrease of his/her (or the group’s) happiness?

137 This article also appeared as a chapter in Ciulla (2004a).

Where would the motivation for such an action come from? Representatives of the moral sense school would again point to the inherent sense of disinterested benevolence which is (besides self-interest) also part of human beings, and which needs to be strengthened through character formation. Kanungo and Mendonca follow Blanchard and Peale’s sugges-tion of strengthening these altruistic nosugges-tions through continuous self-transformasugges-tion of a leader by tapping the “sources of ethical power” (:143), which are purpose, prudence, (healthy) pride, patience, persistence, and perspective. While in theory this sounds conclu-sive, remembering the gross unethical behaviour of leaders which has led to so many economic and political disasters over the last years leaves a nagging suspicion that somehow there still seems to be something missing in the equation. Keeley, referring to the “common complaint [...] that many of our organizations are going to ruin because those in charge have let private interests (their own included) run amok” (Keeley 1995:68), comes to the conclu-sion that “it’s difficult, in theory, to get from selfish public and corporate officials to selfless transformational leadership—perhaps even harder, in practice” (:78). The inclination to altruistic behaviour might not be as strong as Kanungo and Mendonca would like it to be.

After all, the overwhelming evidence around us points to the fact that a menschenbild which considers human beings in general of the same moral calibre as Mother Theresa or Ghandhi will not be able to pass a reality check. The whole ethical discussion around TRANSFORMATION

-AL LEADERSHIP would gain credibility and depth if it was led on a foundation more attuned to reality. From the point of view of Christian virtue ethics and a menschenbild which counts on the imago Dei inherent in human beings, one can certainly agree to the supposition that there is great potential in human beings. However, the fallenness of human nature and the neces-sity of redemption will put serious limitations on humans’ ability for self-transformation.

Rather, Christian virtue ethics counts on the transforming work of God’s Spirit in the life of a person as the foundation for ongoing character formation.