leadership

SEVEN MORAL CHALLENGES OF LEADERSHIP

Nicholas Emler University of Surrey

Our understanding of leadership (and its failures) depends on understanding the moral challenges particular to leadership. This article describes 7 challenges: resisting the temptation of personal gain at collective expense; foregoing the attractions of tyranny; managing justice; pursuing a moral mandate; avoiding mission failure; minimizing collateral damage in pursuit of the mission; and doing good. I close by noting the morally neutral bias of top-down leadership selection typical of real-world social organizations and by drawing out implications for relevant practitioner groups.

Keywords: leadership, ethics, morality, social organization, selection

This article argues that people in leadership positions face seven moral challenges that rarely confront nonleaders. Good leadership therefore requires extraordinary moral qualities; bad leader- ship, lacking these qualities, can do immense damage. This makes the moral character of potential and actual leaders a question of great importance. And this in turn has implications for executive coaches, for those involved in selection and promotion, and indeed for those with input to the design of organizations and their governance systems.

This article is organized as follows. I begin with a definition of the central concepts. I then briefly review attention to the ethical dimension in theories of leadership. Following this I discuss each of the moral challenges in more detail. Finally, I consider why things go wrong and what practical lessons there may be for consulting psychologists.

Definitions

Morality, Character, and Moral Challenge

Morality is defined as a set of principles, rules, and standards of conduct that together function to support the survival of a culture (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Hogan, Johnson, & Emler, 1978). Moral foundations theory (Haidt & Joseph, 2004) identifies five sets of moral intuitions that have been found to serve this function across human cultures; this article emphases two of these, harm/care and fairness/reciprocity. The first is reflected in injunctions not to do foreseeable and avoidable harm to the person, dignity, or legitimate interests of others and the positive requirement to protect their welfare. The second relates to expectations that one will act fairly in one’s dealings with others, respecting obligations of reciprocity and justice. These two are chosen as particularly relevant to the effective exercise of leadership in contemporary Western culture.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nicholas Emler, Department of Psychology, University of Surrey, Stag Hill, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK. E-mail: n.emler@surrey.ac.uk

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Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research

© 2019 American Psychological Association 2019, Vol. 71, No. 1, 32–46 1065-9293/19/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000136

32

Character refers to the set of virtues—courage, loyalty, honesty, humility, and so forth—a person is credited with when judged to live up to moral expectations and injunctions. Character is an aspect of personality but personality understood as reputation, the perceived behavioral consis- tencies an individual displays. Our knowledge of the origins of these consistencies is incomplete. All probably have genetic components but are refined by experience, becoming relatively stable by the early 20s (Viken, Rose, Kaprio, & Koskenvuo, 1994). There are other terms that appear superficially similar to strength of character but are distinct. Thus, qualities reflected in such concepts as self-regulation and self-control are relevant to displaying strong moral character but are not themselves equivalent to character; these qualities can also characterize activities without moral content such as dietary or exercise regimes. The particular attributes of moral character and more specifically the virtues relevant to good leadership will be spelled out in more detail as I discuss its moral challenges.

As to what constitute moral challenges, these are circumstances in which there are strong pressures or inducements to act contrary to moral standards. The point of this article is that positions of leadership entail a range of moral challenges that are quite distinct in extent, complexity, and intensity, while the consequences of failure to meet these challenges can carry very high costs. It would be unhelpful to judge any single failure to meet a moral challenge as evidence of immorality; impeccable character is an ideal rather than the population norm. But equally, it would be reasonable to attribute character flaws to anyone routinely failing in this way and, given the potential costs of failure by those in leadership positions, this does urge particular concern about the moral character of such persons.

A further point should be made here. The extant psychology of moral conduct and character development is of limited help because it is almost entirely derived from study of individuals outside of any organizational context, except insofar as they might occupy subordinate positions. What makes the range of moral tasks entailed in positions of leadership so distinctive is the core requirement of such positions not to act for oneself but on behalf of the collective.

Leadership and Social Organization

It is helpful to distinguish two senses of the term leadership. First, leadership can be understood as a position within the hierarchy of a social organization or unit. In this sense moral challenges are definitive of the position. Second, leadership can be regarded as a quality of the performance of incumbents in such positions. In this sense leadership refers to the adequacy of a person’s response to these moral challenges.

Leadership in the first sense depends on two assumptions. The first is that humans are social animals. All social species are, by definition, cooperative and in some cases display highly coordinated and apparently organized action. However, the flexibility and complexity of organiza- tion of which humans are capable does set the species apart. Key to this is the uniquely human attribute of language, which has allowed humans to organize around shared plans, agreements on tasks, and allocation of responsibilities for these; to make use of instructions; to provide feedback, and so on (the invention of alphabets and diffusion of literacy supported a further step change in the power and sophistication of human social organization). Human social organization has also been shaped by social evolutionary pressures (cf. LeVine & Campbell, 1972); more effective forms have successively displaced or defeated the less effective.

The second assumption is that, beyond a minimum size and level of complexity, social organization requires hierarchy (Berry, 1976; Mintzberg, 1973). That is, social action is subject to hierarchical control: One individual coordinates and directs the actions of others. Positions of leadership are therefore intrinsic to social organization.

Human social organization is a powerful adaptive mechanism. It generates the capacity to accomplish things that could not be done by individuals acting alone or even through coordination with others, as in the coordinated hunting of lions and dogs or the cooperative foraging and defense of chimpanzees and baboons. Historically, organized human action constructed the pyramids and the Great Wall of China but also produced dykes to defend cultivated land against flooding and sustain their irrigation systems (Harris, 1977). Today, social organization is the basis for every aspect of

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33MORAL CHALLENGES OF LEADERSHIP

human survival from food production and distribution, to water supply and waste disposal, to the provision of dwellings and power, to health care and security.

Two concepts that overlap with leadership are needed in the following discussion. The first is authority; positions of leadership carry authority in some form, and it is needed to discharge leadership tasks. The precise form of authority will vary across leadership positions, although of the three forms that Weber (1947) identified—charismatic, traditional, and legal-rational—modern social organizations rely extensively upon the last—as Weber predicted. The second concept— power—overlaps with authority in that both refer to the capacity of leadership to direct others to do things they would not do on their own. Power is the broader concept (French & Raven, 1959; Weick, 1969); it can refer to influence based on formal (legal-rational) authority, superior expertise, privileged access to information, decision-making rights, and control over resources (including control of the capacity to punish or reward). However, social organization also generates power in the sense of being able to accomplish things through collective action, and positions of leadership direct this power.

The Ethical Dimension in Theories of Leadership

Many current theories of leadership recognize an ethical component to the leadership role, though only a few place successful response to moral demands at the heart of good leadership.1 The original trait approach to leadership was largely descriptive and did not deal with leader effectiveness. However, when reviews (e.g., Stogdill, 1948) suggested that traits are inconsequential, attention shifted toward what leaders actually do, to the content of leadership as a role (Bales, 1950), and to the manner in which the role might be performed (Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939). A recurring theme in this research was the contrast between concern for tasks and concern for people (Blake & Mouton, 1964). This approach implicitly recognized that leadership involved ethical issues because followers could be adversely affected by their leaders’ decisions and behavior. The analyses of style focused more explicitly on effectiveness. Contingency theories (e.g., Fiedler, 1978) proposed that the effectiveness of different styles depends on the contingencies within which leaders operate.

Other approaches examined how different styles of leadership impact followers’ motivation. This brought a focus on leadership ethics. For example, the (ethical) principle of fair or equitable exchange lies at the heart of leader-member exchange theory (LMX; Dansereau, Graen, & Haga, 1975). However, LMX theory does not imply that leaders have any general obligation to treat people fairly. On the contrary, extreme partiality is compatible with the theory, and leaders are free to show favor to a minority of followers in exchange for their support.

The notion of transformational leadership (Burns, 1978; Bass, 1985) contrasts with the trans- actional emphasis of LMX in proposing that followers can be motivated by appeals that transcend self-interest. Burns argued that a transformational style motivates followers by linking their efforts to higher moral goals. Avolio and Gardner (2005) expanded this idea with the concept of authentic leadership, one of whose four components is an “internalized moral perspective.” More recently, Riggio, Zhu, Reina, and Maroosis, (2010) advocated a virtues-based model of leadership that defines the moral qualities associated with effective leadership. Their model focuses on four virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice.

More generally, the evolution of style-oriented approaches to leadership coincided with renewed empirical interest in leadership traits. Thus, Kenny and Zaccaro (1983) showed that members of ad hoc groups can agree about who among them is most leaderlike (see also Livi, Kenny, Albright, & Pierro, 2008). However, this work did not address the qualities possessed by those people seen to have the strongest leadership qualities.

Lord, De Vader, and Alliger (1986) reevaluated the evidence reviewed by Stogdill (1948) and others (e.g., Mann, 1959) using the more powerful tools of meta-analysis. They found that several

1 Seijts, Gandz, Crossan, and Reno (2015) provided an empirical case for the importance of moral character in leadership positions in a specifically business context.

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34 EMLER

traits, but most prominently intelligence, reliably distinguish those rated highly for leadership. A further important step has been to distinguish leadership emergence from leadership effectiveness. Reviewing evidence on both, Judge, Bono, Ilies, and Gerhardt (2002) reported that certain person- ality variables are also consistently associated with effective leadership and prominent among these is the moral quality of conscientiousness.

In this brief overview of leadership theory, two more recent perspectives deserve mention. Social identity theory (SIT), elaborated by Hogg and others (e.g., Hogg, 2001), emphasizes the role of followers in determining whose leadership is accepted. The key idea is that the group member perceived to be most prototypical in terms of group norms will be given leadership status. However, in contrast to Lord and Maher’s (1993) implicit leadership theory, leadership stereotypes in SIT are not generic; they are defined by the norms of the in-group because they distinguish the in-group from the most salient out-group. Thus, although the theory associates leadership with conformity to normative standards, these standards are relative to context. This contrasts with, for example, Riggio et al. (2010), who assume that the relevant virtues are universal and invariant.

Second, the evolutionary perspective on leadership (Van Vugt, Hogan, & Kaiser, 2008) asks: What is in it for followers? It proposes that there are selective advantages for individuals associated with membership of well-led groups. If so, then, as a species, we should also prefer (as leaders) people who will deliver benefits to the group, and we should monitor their performance against these preferences.

I conclude this section with two observations. First, we do not have a case for leadership-specific virtues in the sense that, for example, medical ethics supposes a set of moral challenges particular to the practice of medicine. Riggio et al.’s (2010) virtues scale exemplifies the problem; why should we care about certain virtues in leaders any more than in people generally?

Second, the case for leadership virtues is undeveloped because the concept of leadership effectiveness is, if not underdeveloped, narrowly conceived. Effectiveness is normally defined in terms of the core mission of an enterprise. So, for a shareholder-owned company, leadership effectiveness might be judged in terms of company profits. For an army, leadership effectiveness might be measured in battles won. Even these cases, however, reveal that effectiveness will almost always be open to multiple definitions, given the interests of different stakeholders; company employees might define effectiveness in terms of job security, soldiers in terms of casualty rates. In the next sections I argue for a multifaceted appreciation of leadership effectiveness, and I present a case for seven different moral challenge associated with the exercise of leadership.

Seven Moral Challenges of Leadership

The seven challenges can be summarized as follows, ordered in terms of their degree of complexity: (a) resisting the temptation of personal gain at collective expense; (b) foregoing the attractions of tyranny; (c) managing justice; (d) pursuing moral mandates; (e) avoiding mission failure; (f) minimizing collateral damage in pursuit of the mission; and (g) doing good. I now describe each in more detail, noting the consequences of failing to meet these challenges and the regularity with which such failures occur.

Positions of Trust—The Temptations of Personal Gain

Juvenile crime is a significant social problem. In many Western countries, juvenal crimes account for the majority of all recorded crimes with the peak age for arrests in the early teens (e.g., Smith, 1995). Teenagers steal things, but the average absolute value of items stolen is not great, and the reason is obvious: To commit crimes, one needs opportunity. The opportunities available to adolescents are limited and societies are generally arranged to ensure this is the case; we do not put significant opportunities for criminal gain in the way of people whom we have reasons to mistrust.

Obtaining access to such opportunities requires having a position in an organization with control over material resources—that is, one needs to occupy a position of trust. Such positions are related to levels in an organizational hierarchy.

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35MORAL CHALLENGES OF LEADERSHIP

It is noteworthy that shops, hotels, and other commercial enterprises lose far more to employee than to customer theft (Bullard & Resnik, 1983; Wimbush & Dalton, 1997). It is also noteworthy that these enterprises invest heavily in efforts to limit the dishonesty of their employees. Advances in the sophistication of supermarket checkout equipment, for example, are driven more by attempts to eliminate employee pilfering of cash than by the desire to ease customers through the checkouts (Mars, 1982).

But at higher levels of organizations these kinds of controls are harder to implement so organizations instead must rely progressively more on trust. The further up the hierarchy, the greater the degree of trust, and therefore the greater the opportunities for criminal gain. We all face temptations in our private lives, but the temptations are for the most part limited, and the strength of character required to resist them is also limited. The temptations present at higher organizational levels call for much greater resources of character.

When the character resources are not equal to the temptations of illicit gain, we see theft on a scale that the most energetic and resourceful juvenile criminal can only dream about (cf. Conklin, 1977; Dyke, Morse, & Zingales, 2013). The range and costs of such frauds are immense and not limited to (fictional) bank employees moving to South America with the contents of the safe; they include the excesses of Jacob Zuma of South Africa and the Russian oligarchs.

The moral challenge here reflects the test of a leader’s honesty and probity posed by the easy and sometimes immense gains offered by the position occupied.

Positions of Power—The Attractions of Tyranny

There are at least four reasons why people wish to hurt others. First, we like some people but find others irritating, annoying, or obnoxious. A special case is the dislikes and antipathies based on others’ category memberships. People dislike others purely because they are different—because they are Catholics, Jews, Muslims, or Hindus and not Protestants, or because they are women or socialists or homosexuals or gypsies, or because they are French or Turks or Greeks. Such prejudices are well documented, as are the hostile responses with which they are associated (LeVine & Campbell, 1972).

A second reason for annoyance is when others act in an insulting or disrespectful fashion. If people lie, cheat, humiliate, or callously exploit us, this is a natural basis for our anger (cf. Averill, 1983); moreover, perceiving others’ intentions as rude or hostile often leads to violent retaliation (Dodge, & Crick, 1990). When people are attacked in front of an audience, the tendency to retaliate is even stronger, in order to avoid seeming to be an easy target for future victimization (cf. Felson, 1982).

Third, we may become hostile when others appear to be obstacles to our goals and plans. One of the oldest ideas in the study of aggression is the frustration-aggression hypothesis (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939). The basic proposition is simple: If we are frustrated in our attempts to achieve a goal, we become aggressive. This hypothesis also proposes that hostile responses will be displaced from the source of frustration to other targets when it is unsafe to attack the real source. This makes the hypothesis particularly relevant in the present context.

Finally, some people are bullies (Olweus, 1993; Smith, 1991); they enjoy tormenting others and are often adept at identifying easy victims (Sutton, Smith, & Swettenham, 1999).

Aggression is not always free. Victims may retaliate (cf. Hogan & Emler, 1981), aggressors can be attacked on social media, and authorities may intervene to punish the aggressor. Things are different, however, for people in leadership positions. Their power and authority mean their options are not constrained in the normal manner. Victims are often unable to retaliate because they have too much to lose; employees, promotions, pay rises, and even jobs can be at risk. Consequently, those in leadership positions have freedom to act on their personal dislikes, express their bigotry, take revenge against subordinates they believe have offended or obstructed them, or simply indulge their inclinations to bully.

The larger the social organization, and the more powerful the individual, the more invulnerable they feel. And, as Altemeyer (1996) has shown, organizations always contain people who are willing to do their leaders’ dirty work—that is, to intimidate, persecute, and torture if asked. The patronage

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36 EMLER

available to senor people (cf. LMX theory) enables them to recruit helpers and keep them loyal. But willingness is not strictly necessary. Milgram’s (1974) research on obedience to authority demon- strated that even the unwilling will take on the torturer’s role if told to do so by people with the appropriate trappings of institutional authority. Finally, people at the top of social organizations can use the entire organizational apparatus to pursue tyranny.

One sad lesson of history is that people in positions of power and authority often succumb to these temptations. Harvey Weinstein, former head of a movie production company, is a notorious example of someone using his position to harass others; bullying in the workplace is a pervasive problem (Lutgen-Sandvik, Tracy, & Alberts, 2007). Then there are the horrors perpetrated by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussain, and others. Rummel (1994) offered a chilling statistic: He estimated that between 1900 and 1987, 169 million people were killed for “political” reasons. Of these, 38.5 million were killed by invading armies, but the remaining 130.5 million were murdered by their own governments. The greatest risk to one’s life is often posed by the people running one’s own country.

This is a potent moral challenge because compassion, tolerance, and determination to avoid harm to others must win against the gratification of impulses that, particularly for those at the top of organizations, face little obvious sanction.

Positions of Authority—Ensuring Justice

People care a lot about justice. Indeed, fair treatment matters more to people than getting as much as they can. The evidence on this is extensive and supports the argument that the justice motive is a powerful driver of human behavior (Lerner, 1977). As Etzioni (1990) observed, a concern for fairness regularly trumps self-interest, and consequently people often act unselfishly. People will also be satisfied with outcomes not based on their absolute magnitude but because the outcomes correspond to what people believe they deserve. However, with a few exceptions, psychological research on justice has been about how people react to how they have been treated. This research has had little to say about the principles applied by those who deliver justice.

Researchers have also studied people’s feelings about the procedures that determine their outcomes (Thibaut & Walker, 1975; Leventhal, 1980). The research showed that people are as much concerned about fair procedures as they are about fair outcomes (e.g., Tyler, 1990, 1997). My point here is that, as with research on distributive justice, the focus of this research has been upon the reactions of the recipients of justice—that is, the subordinate parties in the relationships.

Research has told us little about the requirements for successfully dispensing justice, but it has said a lot indirectly about how the recipients of justice react. And this also leads us to anticipate high costs when leadership gets these decisions wrong. Apart from evidence linking unfair treatment to workplace aggression (Baron, Neuman, & Geddes, 1999), the reactions, including depressed morale, lowered motivation, and resentment-driven sabotage, will significantly increase the threat of mission failure (cf. Deutsch, 1991; Greenberg, 1990), regardless of the mission. Deutsch (1985), for example, showed that the success of organizations depends on the willingness of employees to engage in informal helpfulness and cooperation that goes beyond formal job descriptions, a phenomenon subsequently interpreted as organizational citizenship (cf. Borman & Penner, 2001). Deutsch also documented the ease with which such willingness can be undermined by unjust reward structures. However, although the damaging effects of unfair treatment are known, the prevalence rate for failures under this heading is not.

As with some of the other moral challenges, this one is substantially a matter of paying careful and constant attention to the effects on others’ outcomes of one’s decisions and nondecisions and of the policies over which one has stewardship—and this also against the pull of playing favorites.

Positions of Obligation—Pursuing a Moral Mandate

When people choose candidates for positions of leadership they not only choose based on relative competence and moral integrity but on moral priorities (cf. SIT; Hogg, 2001). This is most evident

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37MORAL CHALLENGES OF LEADERSHIP

in the political domain. Republican and Democratic candidates for the Presidency present them- selves as representing quite different moral values. Democrats ostensively prioritize equality over individual liberty, whereas Republicans typically reverse this order. Consequently, when U.S. citizens vote, they vote for particular moral positions.

Whether the same political dimensions underlie all social organizations is not clear. It may be the case that the choices in some organization are easier because there are fewer competing values. Nonetheless, organizations differ in their values and the value conflicts they embody; think, for example, of the differences between hospitals, universities, orchestras, advertising agencies, and military units.

Leaders therefore need to articulate values-driven visions for the direction of the collective enterprise. Values are abstract concepts, and leaders must translate these abstractions into goals with which followers can identify. Even if followers cannot articulate their values, they can recognize their embodiment in specific projects. It will be difficult for leaders to be persuasive if they are not clear about their value priorities or their implications. Indeed, without being clear about their values, they risk decision-making paralysis. SIT additionally predicts that for the leadership of a collective to secure followers’ support those values need to be aligned with the values of the wider collective (Platow, Haslam, Reicher, & Steffans, 2015), and research has indicated that such alignment underpins the ability of leaders to influence their followers (Barreto & Hogg, 2017).

How often leaders fail to recognize their moral mandate remains for the present unclear. Nonetheless, if leaders cannot exercise influence, then the organization cannot function.

The moral challenge here arises because clarity about values calls for focus, and sometimes hard intellectual work, in the face of myriad distractions.

Positions of Responsibility—The Risk of Mission Failure

Mission failure does not seem like a moral challenge. But social organizations exist to do something. At stake are outcomes of real consequence to those involved. The stakes may be largely symbolic, as in the efforts of sports teams to win competitions, but frequently jobs and money are at stake—sometimes even national survival.

When the mission falters or fails the costs can be enormous. Consider three examples. First, there are the financial losses suffered by people with shares in Enron, which failed because of the greed and incompetence of Enron’s senior management. Second, the famines and food shortages so common in Africa have little to do with natural disasters; they are almost entirely man-made, due in large part to the mismanagement of national economies. Third, there is the second Battle of the Somme in 1916. The British army suffered more casualties in a single day—57,000 killed or injured—than any other army has suffered in the history of warfare. Dixon (1976) reviewed a long list of British military catastrophes and concluded that the primary cause of the Somme disaster (and most of the others he described) was the incompetence of the British commanders.

The same is usually true about any mission failure, namely that it is caused by the incompetence of those in charge, and this too is a kind of moral failure. There are various reasons why mission failure belongs in the list of moral challenges for leadership.

First, not all big decisions will be popular, and people who are chosen as leaders because they are well liked (cf. “high likeability floater” in Hogan, Raskin, & Fazzini, 1990) often try to avoid the unpopularity associated with making hard choices. Moral leadership requires choosing the right course of action when other options have more short-run popular appeal.

Second, good strategic decision-making requires focus. Social organizations are complex environments that provide myriad distractions. When leadership becomes distracted, mission failure is always possible. The temptations of personal gain and tyranny are forms of distraction, but other, more subtle distractions can be mistaken for aspects of the mission. Strength of character is important for basing all decision-making on the core mission of the enterprise and not chasing rabbits down holes.

The third reason why the risk of mission failure is a moral challenge is that many leaders refuse to recognize the limits of their competence. Organizational missions are routinely put at risk by leaders who cannot see their limitations. The boss who surrounds himself with yes-men is a cliché

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38 EMLER

but describes a common problem in the political, military, and commercial spheres. Leaders often create conditions in which no one feels able to give them advice. Reviewing research on groupthink, Tetlock (1979) concluded that the risk is highest under leadership that discourages open discussion of decisions and strategy. Another of Dixon’s (1976) case studies, Admiral Tryon, surrounded himself with subordinates who could see that his orders would lead to disaster but were unable to tell him so; this led to two battleships colliding and sinking with a loss of over 700 lives.

Sometimes the problem is willful deafness on the part of the leader to whom the good advice is offered. Winston Churchill was guilty of this at the beginning of World War II while he was still First Lord of the Admiralty. In the latter stages of the war, Hitler had excellent advice from military experts but ignored it; the immense German losses in the battles of Stalingrad and Normandy (Keegan, 1982) were the result.

Leaders may not only fail to acknowledge their limitations but also become convinced of their own omniscience. Robert Mugabe, as the prime-minister of Zimbabwe, took it from one of the richest countries in Africa to one of the poorest, reliant on extensive food imports and barely holding mass starvation at bay.

Leaders owe their followers insight into the limits of their own expertise. This requires modesty, even humility, and makes the risk of mission failure a key moral challenge for leadership. The difficulty is that leadership positions attract people with very high self-esteem, a quality seldom associated with clear insight into one’s own limitations. They are often convinced that they are indispensable to the success of the enterprise2 (see Brown, 2014; on the benefits of humility, see Ou, Waldman, & Peterson, 2015; Owens & Hekman, 2012; Owens, Johnson, & Mitchell, 2013; Vera & Rodriguez-Lopez, 2004; on the dangers of hubris, see Chatterjee & Hambrick, 2007; Kroll, Toombs, & Wright, 2000).

In sum this moral challenge is probably most often failed because the habit of attending to good advice is at odds with personality traits linked to leadership emergence, among them supreme confidence in one’s own judgment.

Positions of Care—Avoiding Collateral Damage

The Western Judeo-Christian moral tradition emphasizes the role of intention in judging people’s actions. Thus, Piaget’s (1932) studies of children’s moral judgments identified mature judgments as those that take into account actors’ intentions when assigning blame. But this excludes a large category of actions in which resulting harm is foreseeable and thus avoidable but occurs while acting on intentions with other ends.

We are all responsible for anticipating the risks that our actions entail. When we ignore the risks and cause harm to others, we may be liable to criminal prosecution. Nonetheless, the scale of harm that normally arises in this way is trivial compared to the incidental harm that organized social action can produce, and this potential is often realized. This tendency characterizes government depart- ments, military organizations, and commercial enterprises. Consider the literature on corporate crime (e.g., Box, 1983), three points in particular. First, corporations operate in uncertain compet- itive environments. Second, they are typically driven by one imperative, to be profitable. These two conditions create pressures to break some of the rules that govern their activities. Third, when senior executives break rules, they may not be driven by personal gain but by the desire to achieve corporate goals.

In the 1970s the Ford Motor Company sold a car with a design flaw—rear end collisions could fracture the gas tank and create a fire. Between 500 and 900 people died as a consequence of this flaw. It is inconceivable that senior Ford executives intended these deaths, but it is also clear that they were aware of the risk (Dowie, 1977). Also in the 1970s the pharmaceuticals company Chemi-Grunenthal sold a drug to treat hypertension in pregnant mothers. The drug, Thalidomide, produced birth defects and more than 7,000 children were born with physical defects—notably

2 This may be why CEOs so often see themselves as entitled to vast remuneration despite the absence of any relationship between company performance and CEO pay.

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39MORAL CHALLENGES OF LEADERSHIP

missing arms and legs—before it was withdrawn. The senior company executives who authorized sale of the drug certainly did not do so in order to produce deformed children, but equally certainly they knew as a result of their own testing program the drug’s side effects. These are not isolated cases. According to evidence collected by U.S. federal agencies, about 20 million Americans a year are injured by unsafe consumer products.

Corporations also injure and kill their own employees. Box (1983) estimated that over a 3-year period in Britain nonfatal injuries suffered at work, compared to injuries suffered in criminal assaults, ran at a ratio of 7:1. In the U.S. it is estimated (Reiman, 1979) that avoidable deaths from occupational accidents and diseases stand in a ratio of between 5:1 and 7:1 to deaths recorded as homicides.

Finally, financial losses, both to individuals and to other organizations, arising from illegal corporate practices, run at a rate of 10 times the losses suffered as a result of conventional crime (e.g., Conklin, 1977). Much of this occurs because senior company officials fail to think about the consequences of their decisions or judge them less important than the advantages these decisions offer to company profitability.

At the heart of this moral challenge is the need for an exceptional level of vigilance for consequences beyond the explicit goals of one’s organization, together with a recognition of one’s responsibility for these.

Positions of Opportunity—Doing Good

This is the challenge envisaged by Burns’ (1978) view of transformational leadership. It is the most difficult moral challenge for leadership and the challenge least often met. It is also the most difficult challenge to define, but the basic idea is that leadership provides opportunities to address injustices and other wrongs. Some examples may help.

Research has shown that people believe their political leaders are responsible for enforcing the rules about human rights (e.g., Doise, Staerkle, Clemence, & Savory, 1998). Doise and colleagues reported that many individuals feel they should support the human rights described in the United Nations 1948 declaration but recognize that their power to do so is limited. This is particularly true when foreign governments abuse their own citizens. When Serbian power-holders decided to suppress the political rights of Muslims living in Bosnia, other governments failed to respond and mass murder followed. A few years later the same regime tried to execute the same policy in Kosovo. This time, Western political leaders found the moral courage to do the right thing.

In the corporate sector the actions in January 1989 of Michael Bishop, then chairman of an airline company, stand out. One of his aircraft crashed attempting an emergency landing, killing 47 and injuring 74. Immediately following the crash, he mobilized the organizational resources at his disposal to support both bereaved and the injured in a display of humanity and empathy that went far beyond any legal obligation.

More often, however, history records failures to do the right thing (Cohen, 2001); in the political sphere Brown’s (2014) list of leaders rising to the challenge is depressingly short. But failures are in part because this challenge is fraught with difficulty, and good intentions are not enough. The difficulty is that interventions in social systems designed to fix one problem often have other unintended but damaging consequences. The complex causal linkages in social systems (Weick, 1969) are difficult to grasp.

This is a moral challenge, and the hardest to meet, because doing the right thing will so often be in conflict with other salient obligations—to shareholder rights, in-group interests, respect for local custom—and this is on top of the extreme difficulty of getting it right in doing right.

Why Things Go Wrong and What Can Be Done: Practical Implications

The data indicate that most people want their leaders to exercise high moral standards (Den Hartog et al., 1999; Emler & Cook, 2001; Kinder, 1998; Lord, Foti, & De Vader, 1984). One problem is that power corrupts (cf. Zimbardo, 2007). More specifically (to rephrase this old adage), it is wealth

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40 EMLER

of opportunity combined with the weakness of deterrents that corrupts. And Lammers, Stapel, and Galinsky (2010) showed that merely labeling people as having power causes them to be more dishonest and hypocritical. Then there is the problem of reputation; damaging leadership is often displayed by individuals preoccupied with not appearing to be weak—which has nothing to do with ethically informed behavior (Brown, 2014).

There are various lessons here for executive coaches. One is to familiarize their clients with the nature of the moral challenges that will confront those in leadership roles. It is important to emphasize here that these challenges are not occasional distractions or merely hypothetical diffi- culties; they are intrinsic to the role. Second, it is important to highlight why these are challenges; the issues involved can be complex while the pressures and temptations to ignore or sidestep any challenge will be beyond anything experienced outside of a leadership role.

Third, the costs of failure need to be highlighted. Though these are obvious enough in some cases, they are rather less so in others. This may well be true of failure to ensure justice in the organization but particularly with respect to the duty of care. The regularity with which collateral damage seems to arise unforeseen for organizations indicates a level of vigilance is required that is seldom achieved. Here the manifold and compounded costs to corporations need emphasis. The Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill not only cost lives; it did immense environmental damage and blighted the livelihoods of numerous locals. The negligence and risk-taking of senior executives also caused BP massive reputational damage, wiped 50% off its share value over the following months, and resulted in unprecedent levels of fines. Volkswagen, within 2 days of the emissions-test scandal, lost 35% of its share value.

Coaching could also usefully focus on the development of key virtues. However, it is important to recognize the limits of what can be done here. First, to the extent that moral character is established by the early 20s, scope for further change will be limited. Second, the scope for positive change will depend on what qualities the client already possesses. Humility is associated with willingness to learn and interest in feedback; those lacking this quality will prove difficult to coach. Third, certain areas will provide better returns on coaching efforts. So, for example, a client may be committed to fair treatment of employees but lack insight into the standards of fairness that matter most to employees or may not fully appreciate the importance of procedural fairness. Clients may also lack clarity about their values and so would benefit from assistance in bringing these into focus.

Finally, given few people will possess every relevant virtue, clients should be coached in a more accurate understanding of their strengths and limitations. If the latter are properly recognized they can take steps to compensate. Thus, a client with a strong commitment to honesty may, however, lack empathy or compassion and should be encouraged to identify team members who can provide these assets.

Because there are incorrigible differences between people and therefore limits to what can be achieved through coaching, selection is brought into focus as the crucial opportunity to keep the wrong people out of leadership positions. The criminology literature shows that people differ in their susceptibility to bad behavior, and the differences are exaggerated when social controls are weak (Emler & Reicher, 1995). Such differences in people at the bottom of organizational hierarchies are of small matter, but they become more consequential and damaging as people move toward the top. This suggests that we should select for leadership positions only those with the highest moral credentials.

There are four reasons why this is difficult. First, moral character is multidimensional. People differ in their propensity for violence, destructiveness, and dishonesty (Emler, 1999) but also in their inclination to be helpful, generous, and concerned for others’ welfare (Krueger, Hicks, & McGue, 2001). There are important differences in peoples’ disposition to bigotry, discrimination, and persecution (Altemeyer, 1996) and in the values to which they are most committed (Schwartz, 1992).

More generally, however, most of what we know about moral character is based on studies of individuals as independent social actors; we know almost nothing about variations in moral competence in the exercise of leadership. That is, if leadership entails moral challenges not experienced by individuals as autonomous actors, then ideally we should study people actually

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41MORAL CHALLENGES OF LEADERSHIP

functioning in leadership positions—and this has not yet been done. Nonetheless, there are reasons to expect people will differ in their moral capacity to meet leadership challenges.

The second problem concerns how to evaluate the character of individuals chosen for leadership positions. Highly visible and easily judged attributes disproportionately influence selection deci- sions. So, for example, candidates with charisma are often chosen despite any evidence that this attribute predicts long-term effectiveness. Indeed, the contrary appears to be the case (Chatterjee & Hambrick, 2007). Moral attributes are rather less easy to assess. Personal traits such as conscien- tiousness or integrity require extensive evidence of the kind best derived from close acquaintance with the person concerned (Emler & Cook, 2001; Kaiser & Hogan, 2010).

The third obstacle to selecting good leaders concerns how it is done. We can distinguish between top-down and bottom-up processes. Research on follower evaluations of leaders has implied a bottom-up perspective. However, in most organizations, people are appointed and promoted by those above them in the hierarchy. Cook and Emler (1999) showed that a top-down perspective, in contrast to a bottom-up perspective, gives less weight to information about a candidate’s moral credentials, even when such information is available and unambiguous, and more weight to a candidate’s technical competence. Consequently, top-down processes are relatively indifferent to candidates’ moral flaws. Those making decisions about selection and promotion need as a starting point to be aware of this bias, which echoes Kaiser and Hogan’s (2010) finding that subordinates can be best placed to judge candidates’ integrity. More thorough background checks would also be desirable, but again with awareness of the bias of top-down evaluation; ironically, references are characteristically sought from those most likely to display this bias, namely candi- dates’ current and past bosses. Additionally, selectors should bear in mind the multidimensional nature of virtue and the need to check across the spectrum.

Finally, even when we are able to choose leaders based on an accurate assessment of their character—and the prospects for this are greatest within groups of people that share a network of mutual acquaintances (cf. Coleman, 1988)—we still cannot be certain how they will perform when faced with the intense moral challenges of leadership. Thus, as Boehm (1999) suggested, we should remain alert for signs of moral weaknesses in our leadership. The question remains, however, about what to do when the moral flaws of leaders become apparent.

This is most appropriately addressed through organizational design and the design of gover- nance mechanisms in particular. Because moral challenges are intrinsic to leadership and failure rates are high, organizational design, informed by criminology, should minimize opportunities for mischief, include credible deterrents, and reduce absolute discretion at the top that otherwise allows corporations to drift toward dictatorships (Anderson, 2017). For effective corporate governance there needs to be real separation of powers, with boards of directors sufficiently independent of CEOs that they can undertake proactive oversight of company activities and conduct rigorous regular reviews. And, excluding a return to the favored succession device of the Roman empire— assassination—boards should have powers to remove morally failing executives in a timely fashion.

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Received June 13, 2018 Latest revision received February 6, 2019

Accepted February 6, 2019 �

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