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Habitual Leadership Ethics: Timelessness and Virtuous Leadership in the Jesuit Order

Author

Listed:
  • Jose Bento da Silva

    (Warwick Business School)

  • Keith Grint

    (Warwick Business School)

  • Sandra Pereira

    (Warwick Business School)

  • Ulf Thoene

    (Universidad de la Sabana)

  • Rene Wiedner

    (Warwick Business School)

Abstract

This paper is about the relationship between leadership, organisational morals, and temporality. We argue that engaging with questions of time and temporality may help us overcome the overly agentic view of organisational morals and leadership ethics that dominates extant literature. Our analysis of the role of time in organizational morals and leadership ethics starts from a virtue-based approach to leading large-scale moral endeavours. We ask: how can we account for organizational morality across generations and independently of the leader? To address this question, we studied the leadership model of the Jesuits, a Catholic Religious Order. Our case reveals that a virtue-based model of leadership does not necessarily imply that those who are selected to lead the organization are themselves virtuous, but that the processes underpinning the exercise of leadership are cyclical and repeated as truthfully as possible. Virtuous leadership, for the Jesuits, is therefore about the construction of an ideal type of leadership against which the processes which sustain it were designed. Our theoretical contribution is twofold. First, we propose an habitual understanding of moral forms of leadership, in which the procedural is constitutive of moral forms of organising; second, we explain how “timelessness”, understood as the quality of not changing as years go by, allowed the Jesuits to centre the processes which sustain their ethical model on the repetition, across space and time, of said processes, rather than on their outcome. We conclude that the search for virtue might be more relevant for large-scale moral endeavours than virtue itself.

Suggested Citation

  • Jose Bento da Silva & Keith Grint & Sandra Pereira & Ulf Thoene & Rene Wiedner, 2023. "Habitual Leadership Ethics: Timelessness and Virtuous Leadership in the Jesuit Order," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 188(4), pages 779-793, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:188:y:2023:i:4:d:10.1007_s10551-023-05501-1
    DOI: 10.1007/s10551-023-05501-1
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Patricia Werhane & Laura Hartman & Dennis Moberg & Elaine Englehardt & Michael Pritchard & Bidhan Parmar, 2011. "Social Constructivism, Mental Models, and Problems of Obedience," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 100(1), pages 103-118, April.
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    4. Crevani, Lucia & Lindgren, Monica & Packendorff, Johann, 2010. "Leadership, not leaders: On the study of leadership as practices and interactions," Scandinavian Journal of Management, Elsevier, vol. 26(1), pages 77-86, March.
    5. Sven Kunisch & Blagoy Blagoev & Jean M. Bartunek, 2021. "Complex Times, Complex Time: The Pandemic, Time‐Based Theorizing and Temporal Research in Management and Organization Studies," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 58(5), pages 1411-1415, July.
    6. Rost, Joseph C., 1995. "Leadership: A Discussion About Ethics," Business Ethics Quarterly, Cambridge University Press, vol. 5(1), pages 129-142, January.
    7. Bento da Silva, Jose & Llewellyn, Nick & Anderson-Gough, Fiona, 2017. "Oral-aural accounting and the management of the Jesuit corpus," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 44-57.
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    Cited by:

    1. Wendelin Kuepers & David M. Wasieleski & Gunter Schumacher, 2023. "Temporality and Ethics: Timeliness of Ethical Perspectives on Temporality in Times of Crisis," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 188(4), pages 629-643, December.

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    Keywords

    Leadership; Ethics; Jesuits; Time; Virtues;
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