Abstract
This study contextualizes business leaders’ perspectives on business-society interaction through the theoretical lens of wisdom. Morally effective interaction between business and society relies on shared perceptions of expected values grounded in leaders’ virtuous behavior. Through empirical fieldwork across industries in a developing society, the article documents how local business leaders perceive wise leadership in dealing with socially complex problems. Using grounded theory, we inductively developed a model of wisdom, executive wisdom, that identifies 14 characteristics of wisdom, located in three groups: technē, wise decisions, and virtuous disposition. The findings broaden the view of the complex nature of wise decision-making in the business-society context.
Every decision in business has an ethical component, whether acknowledged or not because every decision has a consequence on both business and society, whether intended or not. Because the connection between business and society is deepening (Boehm, 2005), and the ethical tension faced by leaders in the business world is becoming increasingly complex given the political, economic, social, and technological factors (Mumford et al., 2017), we propose that incorporating wisdom principles within the scope of ethical decision-making by leaders in relation to business-society interactions is a useful and important development. Wisdom can be defined as the commitment to seeking the common good (Newstead et al., 2020; Sternberg & Glück, 2019) and giving primacy to human dignity (Mea & Sims, 2019) through the well-being of self and others (Weststrate & Glück, 2017).
Wisdom is increasingly becoming an important concept in the business and leadership context with the growing social awareness of the interlinkages between business and society (Bachmann et al., 2018; Steyl, 2020). Wisdom contributes to enhanced decision-making about socially complex problems within the business-society context in four ways. First, wisdom enables leaders to appreciate and more effectively handle dynamic organizational environments in response to changing situational factors (Jones, 2005). Wisdom can be defined as the decision-making capacity to deal with uncertain situations involving socially complex problems (Intezari & Pauleen, 2019). Wise people are comfortable with uncertainty, understand that situations and people can change, and are well aware of and acknowledge that their current understanding may be flawed or incomplete (Igarashi et al., 2018; Intezari & Pauleen, 2014). Second, wisdom evolves through understanding important matters of life and by reflexively integrating such understanding to enhance the well-being of oneself and others (Weststrate & Glück, 2017). Because wisdom is situation-sensitive, it is particularly relevant when dealing with difficult social challenges (Intezari & Pauleen, 2019).
Third, a strong relationship exists between personal value orientation and cognitive moral reasoning (Weber, 2019). Recent research into wisdom tells us that wisdom is defined by or strongly correlated with values (Webster, 2010), such as tolerance, benevolence, insight, emotional regulation, reflective capability, equanimity, humility, and the capacity to deal with uncertainty. Empirical studies show that wise reasoning and wisdom-related personality predict cognitive and behavioral characteristics such as balanced decision-making, openness, and cooperative behavior (Dunnavant & Levitt, 2015; Grossmann et al., 2017). Fourth, empirical findings suggest that wisdom-based decision-making produces less-biased and more-nuanced decisions (Brienza et al., 2018). This is because wisdom involves a capacity for perspective-taking particularly in relation to values (Kunzmann et al., 2018) and contextual thinking, as well as self- and cultural-reflection (Dunnavant & Levitt, 2015) when dealing with socially complex problems, manifesting in greater attention paid to the bigger picture and the impact of decisions on others (Staudinger & Glück, 2011). Wisdom enables the decision-maker to make decisions that are “rooted in the logic of the field, shaped by empathy towards other stakeholders, and anchored in an ethical principle deemed legitimate in that culture” (Elangovan & Suddaby, 2020, p. 2).
While existing research on wisdom has provided a rudimentary consensus on the contribution of wisdom to leaders’ decision-making, cultural differences may impose different values that shape people’s perceptions of the ethical consequences of leadership practices. The prevalence of Westernized conceptions of wisdom in contemporary studies has magnified the potential for misunderstandings of what wise leadership actually means when it comes to dealing with socially complex problems within the business-society interaction context. For example, Grossmann and colleagues (2012) show that cultural differences have developmental consequences for reasoning about social conflict. In examining how culture influences wise reasoning about social conflicts, they found that younger and middle-aged Japanese, on average, gave wiser responses to intergroup or interpersonal conflicts than did Americans. Therefore, having a nuanced understanding of wisdom in leadership within the business-society context requires careful consideration of the cultural complexities (Küpers & Statler, 2008).
Thus, we posed the following research question: How do leaders in a non-Western society conceptualize wise leadership and its manifestations in dealing with socially complex issues? To address the research question, we considered one non-Western country, Iran, to study leaders’ implicit theories of wisdom in situ. We acknowledge that the “non-Western” term in this study is limited to the Iranian society from where the data have been gathered. While there are significant cultural differences within the Middle Eastern region, which are elaborated below, there are common features that provide a degree of generalizability to the region.
This article is organized as follows. First, we briefly review the theoretical foundations of wisdom. Next follows the details about the research design and the data analysis process. Then, in the Findings section, we provide a rich description of the inductive process used in developing wisdom theory. In the Discussion section, we explain the step-by-step emergence of the findings and their place in the extant literature. We conclude by explaining the implications of this study for further theory development and practice of wisdom in leadership and organizations.
Theoretical Foundations
The study of wisdom occurred only on the pages of philosophy journals until the 1980s when gerontology and psychology studies led to the study of wisdom independently in the United States (Clayton, 1975) and Germany (Baltes & Smith, 1990). Sternberg (1990) in the United States prompted the burgeoning field, while Baltes and Staudinger in Germany (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000) contributed significantly. Each developed different methods of measuring wisdom (Staudinger & Glück, 2011, in Germany; Ardelt, 2003; Webster, 2010, in North America). More recently, Grossmann and colleagues (2016) have been seeking to understand and measure wisdom in the context of its use rather than as a trait or an ideal.
The Concept of Wisdom
The early definitions of wisdom in modern studies focused on three aspects. First, understanding wisdom as expert knowledge or tacit knowledge, the German theorists (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000) define wisdom as an expert knowledge system that provides judgment about complex and uncertain problems. Similarly, Sternberg (1998) defines wisdom as tacit knowledge moderated by values toward achieving the common good. Second, wisdom is associated with personality traits. For example, Ardelt (2003) asserts that wisdom is a personal quality (being an integration of cognitive, affective, and reflective traits) and should not be limited to expertise. Third, wisdom deals with the important and complex matters in life (Staudinger, 1999). After analyzing numerous published descriptions of wisdom, Meeks and Jeste (2009) concluded that wisdom engages social decision-making, pragmatic knowledge of life, emotional homeostasis, pro-social behaviors, self-understanding, value relativism and tolerance, and dealing with uncertainty.
Another enduring conception that the early psychological studies offer is the distinction between personal wisdom and general wisdom (Staudinger et al., 2005; Staudinger & Glück, 2011). Personal wisdom is obtained via personal experiences and refers to insights about one’s own life. General wisdom, on the other hand, is not necessarily based on personal experience, referring instead to one’s concerns about human life and the world in general (Glück et al., 2013). Given this distinction, our study based on an organizational context is concerned more with general wisdom.
More recent empirical evidence further suggests two things. First, wisdom is a contextual decision-making capacity (Intezari & Pauleen, 2018) or reasoning (Grossmann & Brienza, 2018). That is, how people perceive wisdom in their personal life may differ from their perception of wisdom in the organizational context. Second, wisdom is fluid, as people can vary in their level of wisdom depending on the decision situation (Grossmann et al., 2020). One person can display (a lack of) wisdom in different facets of their life. As a contextual decision-making capacity, wisdom engages judgment about complex problems by integrating cognitive, affective, moral, and motivational qualities to guide one’s behavior toward optimizing one’s own and others’ potential (Kunzmann, 2004).
Wisdom in Business
While psychological studies of wisdom have significantly advanced our understanding of wisdom (such as wisdom in the personal life: Glück & Bluck, 2013), they do not offer a contextualized understanding of wisdom in the leadership and business context. It was not until recently that business and leadership scholarship moved toward incorporating wisdom as a relevant and important concept (McKenna, 2019; Rooney et al., 2010). Previous wisdom studies in business see wisdom as integral to morally responsible leadership (Steyn & Sewchurran, 2021) as wisdom involves judgment that extends leaders’ ethical consideration beyond simply determining the good action over the bad for the business.
This view expands the business ethics’ response to the separation thesis (Freeman et al., 2010), which, despite being critiqued by many scholars, may be a pervasively held view even among business and society researchers (Wicks, 1996). The separation thesis, which originates in the work of Hart (1961), distinguishes between “is” statements (descriptive claims about how things are) and “ought” statements (normative or prescriptive claims about how things should be). In the context of business and society or business ethics, the separation thesis is sometimes taken to mean that business decisions (the “is”) can be distinct from ethical decisions (the “ought”; Freeman et al., 2010; Wicks, 1996). The wisdom perspective offers an integrative viewpoint that highlights the profound ethical interconnectedness of business and society. This perspective aligns with the arguments put by Wicks (1996), emphasizing that business and society are not distinct entities but rather are interwoven. Therefore, ethics should not be viewed merely as an external adjunct or a superficial add-on to business operations. Instead, ethical considerations should be recognized as foundational, deeply embedded within the very fabric of business processes and decision-making. We propose that ethical soundness is simply not enough in managing the business-society relationship as the complexity of the business-society interaction needs a capacity for wise judgment about the well-being of self (business) and others (society; Intezari & Pauleen, 2014). It is this aspect of wisdom that offers a view of the inseparable interconnection between business and society.
Furthermore, while rational approaches to decision-making have proven to be highly useful in business decision-making, the approaches are limited in addressing the complexities inherent in socially burdensome problems and where there is high ambiguity and uncertainty around the impact of any possible solutions on multiple stakeholders with conflicting values (Elangovan & Suddaby, 2020). Such decisions require leaders to have more than analytical intelligence as human judgment and insight become critical in the decision-making process (Bierly et al., 2000; Hess & Bacigalupo, 2011; Rosanas, 2013). We contend that a common reason behind many leadership failures in today’s organizations is a well-intentioned but misguided application of codified and almost algorithmic “solutions” to complex problems (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007). However, a wise leader’s decision-making portfolio ought to incorporate the capacity to gather relevant knowledge, understand the reasons and motivations for alternative choices, and apply rational processes (Elangovan & Suddaby, 2020).
Virtues are at the core of decision-making (Mintz, 1996; Sasse-Werhahn et al., 2020; Steyl, 2020), which is a critical quality for leaders when dealing with socially complex problems (Mumford et al., 2000, 2017). Given this moral foundation, wise judgment calls on perspicacity or excellence in judgment (sunesis) based on discernment (gnomē; Sasse-Werhahn et al., 2020; Steyl, 2020). It identifies the need for wise judgment in business situations where ambiguity and dynamism are high and information and time are low (Provis, 2010); the need to deal with competing logics (Sasse-Werhahn et al., 2020); and the importance of transcending the quotidian to consider the longer term (Sasse-Werhahn et al., 2020).
Wisdom Studies in Non-Western Cultures
The philosophical foundations of a contemporary wisdom theory draw mostly from Western philosophy, most notably the Aristotelian approach (Nonaka et al., 2014), and most studies of wisdom have been conducted in Western cultures such as the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. A review of the wisdom literature shows that most definitions of wisdom in psychology since the 1980s have been developed by North American and European scholars (Bangen et al., 2013). Nonetheless, non-Western conceptions of wisdom can offer a rich reservoir of ideas and beliefs that are little known in the mainstream Western world (Yang & Intezari, 2018).
While the primary focus of this article is on the Persian traditions and conception of wisdom, we acknowledge the vast expanse of non-Western philosophies and traditions that have equally rich and diverse interpretations of wisdom. From the Confucian ideals deeply rooted in Taiwanese culture (Yang, 2021), the transient beauty encapsulated in Japan’s Wabi-Sabi (Suzuki, 2021), and the community-centered Ubuntu philosophy of Africa (Atwijukire & Glück, 2021; Newenham-Kahindi & Stevens, 2021) to the introspective depths of Buddhist (Condon et al., 2019) and Hindu Prajña (S. E. Smith & Sharma, 2019) philosophies as well as the ancestral insights of the Maori matauranga (Spiller et al., 2011), Native Americans (Gladstone, 2021), and the Hispanic perspective (Valdez, 1994), the global tapestry of wisdom is vast and varied. These traditions, each with its unique perspective, show the richness and diversity of global thought on this timeless virtue.
While the ethical dimension of wisdom is central across cultures (Glück & Weststrate, 2022), previous studies show that culture can affect managers’ and employees’ ethical decision-making (Sims, 2009) and influence top management’s values in relation to social responsibility (Waldman et al., 2006). For example, in a study of a sample of 1,924 companies in 36 countries, Miska et al. (2018) report that the national culture can predict corporate sustainability practices. Similarly, Zhuang and colleagues (2005) report that organizational members’ adherence to ethical decisions and behaviors may vary across cultures. Wisdom, being culturally and contextually bound, requires business leaders to take into account the cultural characteristics when dealing with socially complex problems.
However, few studies have conducted an in-depth investigation about how wisdom is understood in a non-Western culture and how it manifests in leadership and business-society contexts. From a practical perspective, the interaction between business and society invariably involves ethical dissonances, which can be overcome by each party deeply understanding the other. Therefore, inquiry into a highly contextual conception of wisdom enhances the intellectual vitality of the concept (Weststrate et al., 2019), leading Grossmann and colleagues (2012) to call for more fine-grained cultural analyzes of wisdom-related qualities, in cultures other than that of the United States. Non-Western wisdom studies have mostly focused on Confucian (Yang, 2001, 2016) and Buddhist (Daniels, 2014; Jeste & Vahia, 2008; Levitt, 1999) traditions.
Studying wisdom in context across different cultures is now an emerging topic of interest in areas such as organizational studies (Kessler & Bailey, 2007; Küpers & Pauleen, 2013), leadership (McKenna et al., 2009; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 2011), management (Bachmann et al., 2018), education (Cooke & Carr, 2014; McKenna et al., 2013), sustainability (Cugueró-Escofet & Rosanas, 2020), and decision-making (Brienza & Grossmann, 2017; Intezari & Pauleen, 2018).
Contextual Background
For over two millennia, Iran, historically known as Persia, has stood as a pivotal center of civilization, contributing significantly to philosophical and scientific thoughts with its roots stretching back to 3200 BC. From the early Elamite civilizations through the expansive Achaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the Great to the influential Parthian and Sassanian dynasties, Iran has played a crucial role in shaping the cultural and political landscape of the Near East. Despite the challenges of invasions and the cultural transformations following the Islamic conquest in the 7th century, Iran experienced a renaissance during the Abbasid Caliphate, contributing to the Islamic Golden Age. The nation underwent significant changes from the 19th century, with periods of modernization and reform, leading up to the 1979 Islamic Revolution which established Iran as an Islamic Republic, fundamentally altering its governance and societal norms. The post-revolution era has been marked by tensions with Western nations, particularly over Iran’s nuclear program, defining its modern geopolitical stance amid ongoing international and regional challenges (see Appendix A for a fuller elaboration).
The Historical Concept of Wisdom
The Persian philosophical discourse of wisdom can be examined within two major historical periods: before and after the Muslim conquest of Persia (651 CE; henceforth, pre-Islam and post-Islam, respectively).
Pre-Islam
Prior to the Muslim conquest in the 7th century CE, ancient Persia was a melting pot of traditions and beliefs, including Zoroastrianism, various Hellenistic philosophies, and others, which intermingled to create a multifaceted understanding of wisdom. In this period, wisdom was seen as practical, deeply integrated into daily life and governance, with a strong emphasis on social harmony and the interconnection between individual well-being and communal prosperity. The notion of wisdom encompassed practical morality drawing on reason, knowledge, and free will. This notion is reflected by the Mazdakism philosophy as well as Zoroastrianism’s emphasis on good thoughts, words, and deeds and extended to governance strategies and cultural tolerance under the Achaemenid Empire.
Post-Islam
Following the Islamic conquest, the philosophical landscape in Persia transformed, integrating Islamic theological perspectives with the existing rich panorama of pre-Islamic thoughts. Figures such as Avicenna and Alpharabius played pivotal roles in shaping post-Islamic discourse where wisdom was explored through rational, spiritual, and transcendental lenses. The era witnessed a synthesis of Hellenistic and Islamic philosophies where wisdom transcended mere rationality to include spiritual illumination and a transcendental understanding of the universe. This period also saw a continued emphasis on the societal role of wisdom, now further enriched by Islamic principles. The 20th century brought additional shifts with movements toward modernization and a re-emphasis on religious foundations after 1979, reflecting the enduring complexity and evolution of the concept of wisdom in Iran’s socio-political and cultural contexts.
Business Context
With its rich history and geopolitical location, Iran presents a distinct business environment. Government has significant influence in key economic sectors, such as oil, transportation, and utilities; and the business-society interaction is deeply influenced by Islamic views, economic sanctions, and domestic political dynamics alongside modernization efforts. The cultural landscape, characterized by a preference for hierarchical organizational structures, high in-group collectivism, and a reverence for authority, informs the centralized decision-making processes prevalent in Iranian businesses, distinguishing them from their Western counterparts. Despite international sanctions, local enterprises have driven economic development and employment primarily through resilience and innovation, particularly in the growing entrepreneurship and startup sectors. Family businesses and a well-educated middle class play vital roles in this ecosystem, adapting to a low-trust environment while contributing to societal modernization and the promotion of gender equality and competency. Iranian businesses, while less formalized in corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices than Western standards, are nonetheless engaged in community welfare, driven by traditional Persian values of community service, reflecting a blend of capitalist drive and socio-cultural accountability.
Shared Fundamentals
Although Iran is an Islamic state, it differs from other Middle Eastern countries in that it still retains its own strong Persian (not Arab) tradition and is a Shi’a state rather than the predominant Sunni of the region. Nonetheless, most Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries share considerable religious fundamentals and cultural and historical territories, not the least of which is the response to the Crusades, and more recently, their response to European imperialism in the late 19th and 20th centuries (Frankopan, 2015). For example, in a study of the political perspective of CSR, Murphy and Smolarski (2020) found that most large companies in predominantly Muslim countries share a belief in their ethical duty to support governments in tackling sustainable socioeconomic growth and human rights issues. The shared religious fundamentals can extend the implications of this study beyond the region to other non-Middle Eastern Muslim societies. Moreover, due to the historical influence of the Persian philosophy in the region, the Persian conception of wisdom provides valuable insights into how wisdom is conceptualized in the Middle East.
Method
To answer the research question “how do leaders in a non-Western society conceptualize wise leadership and its manifestations in dealing with socially complex issues?,” we conducted an exploratory inductive study using a well-established and uncontroversial method in wisdom studies based on the distinction in the wisdom philosophical theory between implicit theories, which “are representations of what lay people view wisdom to be” (Swartwood & Tiberius, 2019, p. 18), and explicit theories of wisdom which are “those constructed and tested by psychologists and other experts” (Bluck & Glück, 2005, p. 90). Implicit methodologies, or laypersons’ conceptions of wisdom (Glück & Bluck, 2011), are mostly used by the Bremen School (Baltes & Smith, 1990; Baltes & Staudinger, 2000). In the article by Staudinger and Glück (2011) in the Annual Review of Psychology (see p. 218), they refer to this as a useful means to obtain an understanding of the constituents of wisdom (for a discussion on this, see Ardelt, 2004; Ferrari & Potworowski, 2008).
We used classic grounded theory (GT) to gather and analyze the data (Glaser, 1992, 2001; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We used GT for three reasons, as outlined by Parry et al. (2014) and Ospina (2004). (a) We wanted to understand the phenomenon through the lens of the actors involved (i.e., leaders in situ). The conception of wisdom and how it is identified in practice is deeply embedded in people’s subjective understanding of wisdom in situ. In the leadership context, as Kempster and Parry (2011) assert, GT can significantly contribute to our understanding of the subject matter within a particular substantive context. (b) Wisdom and leadership are culturally and contextually bound, complex phenomena that are difficult to fully capture using purely deductive measuring and operationalizing methods. (c) There is a paucity of research and theories on wisdom in non-Western contexts. We wanted to provide a novel perspective that might have been overlooked by mainstream research due to the complexities involved in studying it in its particular context. In such a context, GT allows for subsequent formal theorizing (Treviño et al., 2014). For a detailed description of the interview protocol, see Appendix B.
Informants
We interviewed senior executives and business leaders in Iran. Due to their significant role in strategic decision-making in their organizations, senior executives and leaders make decisions that significantly impact multiple stakeholders including employees and wider society. To recruit these informants, we used online social networks including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as our personal connections. To identify potential informants, we assessed informants’ eligibility by reading their social media biographies using three criteria: (a) being in a leadership position; (b) regardless of gender, education, experience, and age; and (c) having a non-Western cultural background. The third criterion was used to include participants who self-identified as Iranian, having been raised within the country and having not lived, worked, or been educated outside the country. This stipulation was imperative to ascertain that the data gathered were deeply anchored solely within the Persian culture, devoid of Western influences.
Our sample primarily comprises individuals we reached out to on LinkedIn, with a small portion derived from those contacted through our personal networks and two additional platforms. Once we identified potential informants, we then sent them an invitation message using the LinkedIn messaging feature. Initially, we sent a connection request and a very brief introduction to the research project. Once the invited person accepted the connection request and to be interviewed, a full invitational request was sent to them prior to the interview. The full invitation included the information sheet providing a more detailed explanation of the research project. We ensured that we recruited people from the private and public sectors; in addition, informants with different demographic characteristics were chosen to achieve theoretical sampling (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The emergent interview questions (see Appendix B for the interview protocol) and conceptual categories directed the research to different people and contexts (Goulding & Saren, 2010). The diversity in the sample is important in GT as it helps with the “(1) dense development of properties of categories, (2) integrating of categories and properties, and (3) delimiting the scope of the theory” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, p. 58).
We invited a total of 70 potential informants for interviews over five phases, of which 35 business leaders (52%) accepted and subsequently participated in the interviews. Of the total, 37% (n = 13) of informants were female, and 63% (n = 22) male, with an average age of 42 years, ranging from 27 to 67 years. The gender distribution in the sample is proportional to the gender mix of management in Iran. All informants except one had at least one university qualification (diploma (n = 1, 3%), bachelor’s (n = 6, 17%), master’s or MBA (n = 14, 46%) to PhD (n = 14, 34%). This demographic composition corresponds well to the composition of business leaders in Iran. Informants varied in terms of work experience (x̄ =19.6 years) and were from diverse professional fields, including banking and finance, education, medical and healthcare, city council, information technology and communication, utilities, and consultancy. The practitioners’ organizational hierarchical positions, which varied from front-line team leaders to CEO and senior executives, were from small- to medium-sized enterprises with fewer than 50 employees to large national organizations with more than 50,000 employees.
Analytical Process
Data were gathered and analyzed through a recursive process. Theoretical sensitivity guided the sampling. That is, each round of data gathering and analysis was directed by the findings of the previous interview rounds. Using substantive and theoretical coding, as well as constant comparison, ensured that the emerging themes were grounded in the filed data. We kept on moving back and forth between data gathering, coding, and data interpretation (analytic induction) until the emerging core category became strongly grounded in the field data (Binder & Edwards, 2010), and no new categories emerged relating to the core and sub-core categories. The whole process of data collection and analysis led to a rich and dense core category that integrated and explained the relationship among the sub-core categories (Figure 1).
Data Gathering and Analysis.
For a detailed description of data gathering and analytical process, see Appendices C and D.
Findings
Our findings show how Iranian business leaders perceive wisdom and how wisdom manifests itself in leadership in a non-Western developed country. Based on the findings of this one country, we developed a tentative non-Western model of wisdom. Many conceptual categories emerged in the coding process. Essentially, their perceptions were grouped into three sub-categories following the process outlined earlier: technē, wise decision, and virtuous disposition. The strongest sub-core category was technē. This is characterized by having, and being able to apply, knowledge and expertise, experience, rationality, and situational awareness. Flyvbjerg (2006) describes it simply as “knowing how” based on established epistemic professional knowledge and experience (e.g., engineering, medicine, finance). The second strongest sub-core category was wise decision, which is characterized by conceptual categories such as looking at phenomena from different angles (comprehensive), considering the far-reaching consequences of decisions (foresighted), making significant changes (effective), avoiding late or hasty decisions (timely), and considering ethics (ethical). The third sub-core category is virtuous disposition. Constituting this sub-core category was consulting with others in making decisions about important matters (consultative), self-regulating emotions (emotional regulation), continuously reflecting on decisions (reflectiveness), being aware of one’s own strengths and weaknesses (self-awareness), and going beyond self-interest toward achieving organizational goals and wider community’s interests (selflessness).
The Emergence of the Model
Following Kan and Parry (2004), we provide a thematic model of the hierarchical abstraction that depicts the relationship between conceptual codes, conceptual categories, and sub-core categories (Figure 2). Through the abstraction process, the analysis of the data moves from descriptive analysis to more theoretical and conceptual interpretation that provides an explanation of the subject matter (Goulding, 2002). The lowest level in the model (boxes) represents conceptual codes, and the higher abstraction level (circles) are the conceptual categories. One level higher up the model are the sub-core categories. The highest level of abstraction is the basic social process (the core category), technē-centric problem-solving ability, that integrates the three sub-core categories. The core category is so named because the features of technē predominated in the responses.
The Thematic Map of the Conceptual Codes and Categories.
Table 1 provides the definition of the sub-core categories as well as evidence of the multidimensional conception of wisdom.
Exemplary First-Level Excerpts.
Table 2 outlines the definitions of the sub-core categories constituting the core category. The three sub-core categories contributed to and explained the basic social process (core category) of the technē-centric problem-solving ability moderated by virtuous disposition. The concept of technē is derived from Aristotle, who defines it as reasoned action underlying the art of production (Aristotle, 1984: NE VI, 1140a1–a20). Applied to organizations, it is understood as pragmatic, variable, context-dependent decision-making governed by a conscious goal such as producing a good or service (Flyvbjerg, 2006).
Developing Sub-Core Categories.
The sub-core categories are now elaborated.
Technē
Our informants believed that a wise leader in making decisions needs to have technē above all else. They emphasized that in leadership, having relevant knowledge and experiences and the ability to apply the knowledge and experience in a rational manner based on an accurate understanding of the situation were essential aspects of wise leadership. These categories, which frequently emerged during the interviews, were aggregated under technē. As reported in Table D2 (in Appendix D), 497 (i.e., 45.5% of all the) conceptual codes were related to and categorized into the “Technē” sub-core category. Technē, for our purposes, is technical knowledge or competence (Eikeland, 2008; Nonaka et al., 2014) that is different from pure knowledge in that technē involves real-world consequences and effects (Nonaka et al., 2014). Technē, as identified by our informants, has four dimensions: knowledge and expertise, experience, rationality, and situational awareness. The comments provided in Table 1 (and more in Appendix E) comprise technē in the organizational leadership context.
Knowledge and expertise
Knowledge is an important component of wisdom. The knowledge that our informants referred to were more than “general” knowledge. While general knowledge (about life) may contribute to wisdom in personal life and general context (as proposed by the Berlin school, Baltes & Kunzmann, 2004), general knowledge may fall short in the organizational leadership context. What beyond general knowledge is essential for wisdom in the leadership context is “specialized knowledge” (expertise). In other words, wise leaders must, above all else, be technically competent based on (formal) knowledge tempered by experience.
Experience
A wise leader is one who not only has experience related to the decision situation but also can apply the experience, which is based on an extensive and accurate situational awareness of his or her field. For example, Informant 12, who is an experienced manager with over 25 years of experience in the medical field, identifies both knowledge and experience as components of wisdom: A part of wisdom and reason is derived from experience, and another part of it comes from knowledge and education which is something acquired.
Rationality
In addition to knowledge and experience, the ability to make rational decisions was frequently mentioned to be associated with wisdom. With 91.4% of informants referring to rationality as wisdom, rationality emerged as an important part of wisdom conceptualization. By contrast, only 8.6% of informants believed that intuition leads to wisdom: With regard to organizational leadership, the wise leadership is based on reasoning, and emotions have a very weak role in it. Wise leaders make decisions based on studying, scientific estimation, and specialized examination. (Informant 24)
Situational awareness
Finally, the informants saw wisdom in the leadership context as requiring awareness and consideration of the situation. Thus, situational awareness also emerged as an essential aspect. Endsley (1995) defines situational awareness as one’s “perception of the elements of the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future” (p. 65). Situational awareness has three levels through which the person (a) gathers and perceives relevant information; (b) integrates the various pieces of information to understand the meaning behind the information in conjunction with the preset goals; and (c) to predict and determine future events based on the state of the current situation and system (Endsley, 1995, 2004) Of all informants, 68.6% asserted that a leader cannot make wise decisions if they lack an accurate understanding of the situation: Wise leadership decisions are based on reason, the correct understanding of the situation, [. . .] and our decisions become wiser and more effective if we get aware of others and the surrounding environment. (Informant 33)
Situational awareness allows for timely and effective decision-making (Endsley, 1995), which, as discussed below, emerged as the characteristics of wise leadership decisions.
Wise Decision
While technē is a vital aspect of wisdom (Tsai, 2020), our findings, which are congruent with those of Rowley and Slack (2009, see also Baltes & Kunzmann, 2004; Oakes et al., 2019), also showed that wisdom engages judgment and problem-solving in complex situations. Our informants identified wisdom in leadership by explaining the quality of their decisions. In response to the questions such as “how would you identify wisdom in your organization and leadership?,” informants referred to leaders’ decisions. Of all the conceptual codes, 31.6% (n = 345) were related to the second sub-core category, “wise decision.”
This finding is consistent with the literature in that wisdom is directly linked with the decision quality of leaders (Small, 2004). The early psychological studies of wisdom characterize wise people as problem-solvers who are able to synthesize alternative interpretations to provide solutions to the problem at hand (Kitchener & Brenner, 1990). Gibson (2008) identifies one of the aspects of wisdom as the capacity to decide. The quality of decisions, according to our informants, was determined by the extent to which the decisions were comprehensive, foresighted, effective, timely, and ethical.
Comprehensiveness is described as the extent to which the decision is made based on a thorough assessment of the issues at hand or by considering the situation from different angles. Wisdom draws upon the ability to see the bigger picture (Cammock, 2003). Biloslavo and McKenna (2013) assert that wise leaders have the ability “to view a given situation from multiple perspectives while screening out irrelevant factors, flexible thinking and possessing a multidimensional view of the world” (p. 118). According to Csikszentmihalyi and Rathunde (1990), wisdom engages “holistic cognitive processes that move beyond a fragmented and impassive relativity, toward a more ‘universal’ or metasystemic awareness of interrelated systems” (p. 31). Our informants (Informants 25 and 17, Table 1) believe that leaders who do not comprehensively examine the phenomena from different points of view are unlikely to be able to make wise decisions.
Comprehensiveness also means showing a deep understanding of and paying great attention to details. For example, Informant 8, who is an experienced manager in the education sector, asserts that wisdom entails “scrutinizing” the situation and phenomena: “Wisdom makes the individual or people making the decision scrutinize the various aspects of the issue.” Comprehensiveness is linked to technē in that extensive knowledge and experience can help a leader gain an accurate understanding of different aspects of phenomena (Informant 17, Table 1).
Effectiveness is concerned with the degree to which the leader’s decisions lead to the intended outcomes. The informants associated wisdom with the effectiveness of the decisions that wise leaders make. They believe that wisdom guides the leader to make decisions that prevent the negative consequences that may happen if the problem were left unattended (Informant 14, Table 1). In this sense, effectiveness is linked to other aspects of wisdom, such as comprehensiveness and foresight (see Appendix E for more excerpts).
Cheong and Tsui (2011) argue that the effectiveness of a decision depends on the quality of the information and knowledge on which the leader makes the decision. The effective use of knowledge to make wise decisions that goes beyond mere technē is contained in this statement: Wisdom engages making informed decisions based on knowledge with the observance of foresight and with the use of past experiences. That’s why wise decisions can be very significant in making changes to the organization. (Informant 26)
Foresight is described as the extent to which the future long-term possible consequences of alternatives identified and selected during the decision-making process are critically examined. The classic definition of foresight was provided by Martin (1995): “foresight is the process involved in systematically attempting to look into the longer-term future” by monitoring the indicators of emerging trends (p. 30). Ackoff (1999) defines wisdom as “the ability to perceive and evaluate the long-run consequences of behavior” (p. 14). Engaging abstract thinking and seeing beyond the horizon are established principles of wisdom (Rowley & Slack, 2009). Indeed, Aristotle identifies a phronimos (a wise person who displays Phronēsis) as being able to “see correctly because experience has given them the Eye” (Aristotle, 1984: NE 1143b14). Drawing upon philosophical and psychological descriptions of wisdom, such as Aristotle’s and Sternberg’s, Kok (2009) identifies vision and foresight as one main principle of wisdom. Halpern (2001) explains that wisdom comprises “a way for deciding which goals should be desired, a way that is based on a balance among self and other interests and short- and long-term goals” (p. 255). Lack of foresight, in addition to the lack of comprehensiveness and situational awareness, was identified by one informant as the main reason for many unwise decisions in organizations (see Informant 22, Table 1).
Timeliness means that wise leaders make decisions neither too early nor too late. As one informant stated, “The time aspect should also be included in wise decision-making.” (Informant 9). Intezari and Pauleen (2019) argue that wisdom in the leadership context involves making decisions at the “right time” (“critical time” according to Informant 31), meaning that the decision is made when it will have the most positive impact. If a decision is made later than when it should be, the scope and the level of the problem’s negative impacts may increase. If a decision is made earlier than it should be, i.e., based on the initial signs of a decision situation, the decision-maker may not have enough time to investigate all the aspects of the decision situation (p. 167).
The time that a leader has to analyze and evaluate available and accessible information can affect the quality of the decision. Our informants frequently asserted that making hasty decisions when there is not adequate time to assess different aspects of an issue prevents the leader from making a comprehensive decision (comprehensiveness).
Ethical, the final aspect of wise decision, concerns whether the intended outcomes of the decision and the way that the outcomes are achieved are ethical. Our informants identified ethics as an aspect of wisdom (see Table 1 for exemplary excerpt). This finding that ethics and wisdom are intimately interlinked is supported by the literature (McKenna, 2005; Pasupathi & Staudinger, 2001). Baggini and Fosl (2007) describe wisdom as effective deliberation leading to an ethical course of action. According to Aristotle, “it is not possible to be good in the true sense without Prudence, nor to be prudent without Moral Virtue” (Aristotle, 1984: NE 1144bb, 30–32). Therefore, technē needs to be accompanied by ethics as, without a foundation of values, the leader would not be able to distinguish good from bad (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 2011).
Ethics is necessary but not sufficient for wise decision-making. Ethics is essentially concerned with right and wrong moral conduct. Of course, wise leaders must have moral probity but must go beyond this to enact virtue. Neo-Aristotelian virtue is defined as “an acquired human quality, the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods” (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 191). Furthermore, these goods must be directed toward a telos “constituting the good of a whole human life” (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 203). One virtue identified by informants is selflessness. That is, while informants gave priority to the role of technē in wisdom, this is bounded by the extent to which the leader goes beyond self-interest. Yang (2011) argues that “outstanding leaders may display wisdom if they are able to produce positive influences on themselves, on others around them, on their organizations, and on the larger community” (p. 628). A further aspect of selflessness implied in the findings is a form of intellectual humility because it enables the wise person to see phenomena from different angles (comprehensiveness; Intezari & Pauleen, 2018). As noted by Informant 25 (Table 1), lack of ethics and comprehensiveness can lead the leader to be self-centric.
It is noteworthy, however, that only 54% of our informants identified ethics as a key aspect of wisdom. This may be because ethics is seen as irrational, aligning with the view of Heyler et al. (2016) that “ethical leader decision-making is influenced by emotion, bias, and intuition” (p. 794), although this is not clear from the data. Given that over 90% of our participants believed that wise leaders are highly rational, the proportionally lower emphasis on ethics shows some internal consistency in our findings. The consistency is also reflected (as discussed below) by our informants’ emphasis on emotional regulation (77%).
Virtuous Disposition
Our informants identified some particular patterns of behaviors associated with wise leaders. We refer to these behavioral patterns as comprising a disposition, with the disposition of a wise leader as virtuous. In personal psychology, disposition is defined as patterns of intentional actions that are the consequences of thought and reflection, although “with practice and experience the acts may appear to be spontaneous, habitual, or even unconscious” (L. G. Katz & Raths, 1985, p. 303). Dispositions are “summaries of act frequencies” that produce trends of actions (Buss & Craik, 1983).
Our informants identified five major categories that were associated with a virtuous disposition: consultative, emotional regulation, reflectiveness, self-awareness, and selflessness.
Consultative is described as the extent to which the leader seeks advice from experts. Seventy-seven percent of informants identified consultation as an important aspect associated with wisdom. Underlying this consultativeness is a virtue of intellectual humility. However, being consultative has a practical aspect, as leaders cannot necessarily have “all necessary specialties and knowledge” to deal with problems and issues they face (Informant 16, Table 1). Consultation can also help the leader see phenomena from different angles (comprehensiveness): Consultation is beneficial in examining the various aspects of an issue. (Informant 18)
Emotional regulation, another aspect of a virtuous disposition, “is a process by which human beings control emotional behaviors” (Rosales et al., 2017, p. 1). As discussed in the Technē section, the informants believe that wisdom in leadership means being highly rational, which, in turn, requires emotional regulation to minimize the chance of their decisions being biased by emotions (Informant 24, Table 1).
This separation of emotion and rationality is more consistent with the traditional rationalist approach (Drucker, 1967) than recent research on decision-making (Heyler et al., 2016). The traditional approach describes decision-making as a rational process with clear steps based on the assumption that all probabilities can be objectively measured. Recent research, however, challenges the rationalist school by arguing that human decisions are influenced by non-rational factors such as moral awareness and emotions (Eberhardt et al., 2019; Heyler et al., 2016; Higgs et al., 2020). For example, experiments by Bechara et al. (2000) show that heightened emotions can improve decision-making. Similarly, in the business-society context, Friedrich and Wüstenhagen (2017) identify emotions as a key factor influencing organizational leaders’ decision-making during a period of sustainability-related upheaval within an industry. This informant’s claim is also inconsistent with conceptualizations of the wisdom construct. From the outset, Kramer (1990), for example, conceptualizes wisdom as the integration of cognition and emotion. Furthermore, most wisdom studies acknowledge the role of emotions in wisdom by arguing that factors such as emotions and ethics are crucial to decision-making, and the lack of these factors can lead to inappropriate outcomes (König & Glück, 2013). On the other hand, a wise person “locates the prudent course of action and resists the urgings of the passions and the deceptions of the senses” (Robinson, 1990, p. 14). Our informants believed that because the decisions that leaders make in their organizations are not free from emotions, a leader needs to regulate emotions: A wise leadership decision is based on knowledge, and the role of emotions is very limited in it, though it is not zero. Decision-making is done by a human, and we know that a human has emotions and feelings. Therefore, we cannot say that emotion has no role at all, but its role should be minimized because in wise decisions, we need to distance a little from emotions to attain the intended goals. (Informant 20)
Self-awareness was another virtuous disposition that informants referred to in their conception of wisdom in leadership. Self-awareness is the extent to which the leader is aware of her strengths and weakness, what she (does not) know/s, values, and interests. Informants referred to self-awareness as a prerequisite for wisdom: A wise person certainly starts with herself; she definitely prioritizes knowing herself. Moreover, the wise person uses a comprehensive view and knows others, the environment, and herself before issuing an order. In addition, she uses evidence, open viewpoints, and specialist help. (Informant 12)
Self-awareness moderates the link between technē and decision-making by indicating where a leader’s technē (technical skill and knowledge) may fall short, and therefore should seek advice (consultation). As discussed earlier, consultation can help a leader to make better decisions about the matters for which he or she lacks the required competence. More importantly, without self-awareness, a leader may fail to understand his or her shortcomings and, as a result, make decisions that may require knowledge or abilities beyond the person’s capacity. Self-awareness enables the leader to know where to seek help (for more excerpts, see Appendix E).
Reflectiveness, another dispositional virtue, is described as the ability and willingness to learn from mistakes by evaluating experiences of previous decisions. Reflection refers to an in-depth consideration of a situation, event, or phenomenon to understand one’s own thoughts and feelings about them. Antonacopoulou (2010) shows that self-critical reflection is a vital component part of wise leadership. Our informants described wise leaders as people who demonstrate high levels of flexibility in learning and developing their competencies. They actively reflect on their own thoughts and behavior and, in this way, learn from their mistakes. Reflective skills are valuable resources for a person’s decision-making capacity (G. F. Smith, 2008), by enabling the person to enhance their self-awareness and to learn from their mistakes (Sternberg, 1985). Reflecting on previous decisions is a way to avoid making unwise decisions in the future (Informants 5, Table 1).
Meeks and Jeste (2009) identify “reflective abilities” as a vital component of wisdom. Allee (1997) argues that not all problems can be solved by merely relying on data and objective information; rather by “wisdom solutions” which draw on reflection to clarify the person’s values and purposes toward achieving the most appropriate solution. In a similar vein, Merriam and Caffarella (1999) argue that wisdom consists of “the ability to move away from absolute truths, to be reflective, to make sound judgments related to our daily existence, whatever our circumstances” (p. 165). Ardelt (2003) includes reflection as one of the three dimensions of wisdom in her 3-Dimensional Wisdom Scale alongside cognitive and affective. Bolton (2010) explains that reflection “involves reviewing or reliving the experience to bring it into focus. Seemingly innocent details might prove to be key; seemingly vital details may be irrelevant” (p. 13). One can develop wisdom over time through reflective attention to the meaning of experiences (Gibson, 2008). In this sense, reflection sits between experience and decision-making to improve future decisions by reflecting on previous successes and failures (this relationship is illustrated in our theory, Figure 3, as a direct predictor of Wise decision, and a moderator of the Technē to Wise decision relationship). Reflection can involve simple recall plus considering previous experiences. The following informant identifies documentation (or storing in memory for future use) as a mechanism to record experiences for future reflection: Learning is part of wisdom development—not necessarily by academic learning but through the practical and real one. [Wise leaders] document their successes and failures so that other people can use them and correct themselves. However, rarely you can see these days that top leaders and staff accept their failures and say that they have been wrong because they see the cost of acknowledging their failure is too high. Getting away from bias and documenting it to be used by others and correcting the wrong behaviors will greatly help develop wisdom. (Informant 21)
The Executive Wisdom Model.
Informants also saw the role of reflection in terms of learning from mistakes to achieve selflessness (e.g., achieving organizational interests). This is another aspect of virtuous disposition, which will be discussed in the next section.
Selflessness, the final virtuous dispositional attribute, is described as displaying concern for the needs of others rather than one’s own. Going beyond self-interest (selflessness) to achieve organizational and wider social interests was identified by our informants as an important aspect of wisdom. Fifty-four percent of informants asserted that wisdom in a leadership context requires selflessness. Understanding and considering what is good for the organization and its stakeholders is critical in wise leadership (Gibson, 2008). As discussed earlier in the Findings section, informants defined wisdom as a rational and reason-based decision-making capacity. However, being knowledgeable and experienced and being able to make rational decisions do not necessarily lead to wise decisions. A purely reason-based decision that is directed toward self-interest of the decision-maker or a small group of people in the organization does not produce wisdom. The exemplary comment from Informant 35, who characterizes his organization as unwise, identifies the “selflessness” characteristic of wise leaders. The need to align reason-based decisions with societal benefit is conveyed in the following statement: Wisdom in business is represented in the prioritizing of public interests over short-term ones, [. . .] Wisdom comes after reason and is totally acquired. Wisdom in business is represented in prioritizing public interests over short-term ones, using each other’s facilities, and increasing the efficiency level of organizations. Our current businesses are clear examples of unwiseness. (Informant 35)
Figure 3 illustrates all the aspects (three sub-core categories) of wisdom and their interrelationships based on our data. From this, we propose a model of wisdom in the leadership context, the Executive Wisdom Model (Figure 3). The model illustrates the basic social process that explains how leaders perceive wisdom and believe that wisdom manifests itself in leadership: the implementation of technē moderated by appropriate virtuous dispositions toward making wise decisions.
Technē and virtuous disposition together influence a wise decision. Furthermore, we note an important additional effect that emerged from our analysis of the textual data. Specifically, the degree of impact of technē on wise decision can be influenced by the sub-characteristics noted under virtuous disposition. The findings show that wisdom is a complex and multidimensional quality.
Discussion
The objective of this study was to advance the understanding of wisdom as a new framework for studying leadership within the business-society setting. We pursued the objective (a) by studying the conception of wisdom within a non-Western context and (b) by developing a non-Western model of wisdom that advances extant literature of leadership in the business-society interaction. This is important in determining whether there are particular universal and generalizable characteristics of wisdom, as well as in providing contextual insights into the conceptions of wisdom in the business-society context.
Notwithstanding that this study is confined to one nation, Iran, it does have a degree of generalizability for other Islamic nations, most of whom adopt (Sunni) Islam with their own historical and cultural inflection. The findings then are generalizable to other Islamic countries with the proviso that each will vary to certain degrees according to culture and history. With this in mind, we discuss the findings.
Wisdom has been identified as an important quality for leaders to be effective in today’s turbulent business world and to strengthen their connection with wider society (Mumford et al., 2017). Determining the characteristics of wisdom in business leadership to achieve better organizational decisions toward the well-being of self (the leader and the business) and others (wider society) has been growing as an area of study (Intezari & Pauleen, 2019; McKenna, Biloslavo, & Trnavcevic, 2006). It is vital to better understand the applied wisdom theory given that being wise, particularly in leadership, management, and organization studies, implies being practical (Bachmann et al., 2018; Rooney et al., 2010).
We conceptualized wisdom in a non-Western leadership context using the classic GT. The conception, which explains the basic social process of leaders applying wisdom to make sound decisions involves an interplay between technē, virtuous dispositions, and wise decision, with a moderated relationship between technē and wise decision. The findings show a heavy technocratic tendency among the leaders in this particular non-Western culture. For the leaders, wisdom manifests itself in an interaction between primarily a leader’s technical competence (technē), as well as a virtuous disposition, and the ability to make comprehensive, foresighted, effective, timely, and ethical decisions. The informants referred to knowledge and expertise, experience, rationality, and situational awareness as vital aspects of a wise leader’s technical competence. Wisdom requires that a leader possess technical knowledge and expertise and be able to use the knowledge and experience-based expertise in a very rational manner that also incorporates an extensive and accurate situational awareness of the decision situation. Finally, we note that a set of personal dispositions may influence how leaders use their technical competence to make wise decisions. The five elements of a virtuous disposition that our participants referred to included being consultative and displaying emotional regulation, reflectiveness, self-awareness, and selflessness.
While there are parallels between the current study’s findings and established Western frameworks, several contrasts emerge. These differences, particularly the pronounced emphasis on technocratic leadership and the integration of expertise with virtue, offer a different lens to view and understand wisdom in a non-Western organizational context.
The findings from the current study detail a distinct conception of wisdom in a non-Western context, characterized prominently by its technocratic emphasis. In this framework, knowledge, expertise, experience, rationality, and situational awareness appear to be paramount. This aligns to some extent with the Berlin School’s definition of wisdom as an expert knowledge system regarding complex problems (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000). Similarly, Sternberg’s (1998) balance theory, which emphasizes tacit knowledge moderated by values, resonates with the moderated relationship between technical competence and decision quality (wise decision) in the current findings. Neither of the two perspectives, however, explicitly highlights the technocratic aspect as paramount. For example, Sternberg’s (1998) balance theory, with its focus on tacit knowledge moderated by values, does not capture the particular nuance of a moderated relationship between technical prowess and decision quality (wise decision) that the present study illuminates.
Our findings also incorporate the emotional and virtuous elements of wisdom, emphasizing the leader’s personal dispositions. With a distinct nod to five virtuous dispositions—consultative, emotional regulation, reflectiveness, self-awareness, and selflessness—the findings reveal the intertwining of cognitive expertise with personal qualities. This integration is partially congruent with Ardelt’s (2003) 3D-WS model, where wisdom is seen as an amalgamation of cognitive, affective, and reflective traits. However, the intricate blending of technical know-how with virtuous disposition, emphasizing the intersectionality of knowledge, rationality, experience, and situational awareness, offers a more holistic and integrated perception of wisdom than Ardelt’s three-dimensional wisdom scale (3D-WS), which considers wisdom as the interaction between three distinct traits: cognitive, affective, and reflective. Ardelt’s model suggests that wisdom is a personal quality and should be kept distinct from mere expertise. In contrast, the present findings weave expertise into the very fabric of wisdom, melding it with virtuous dispositions.
The most recent empirical studies suggest that wisdom is fluid and context-specific. Most particularly, Grossmann and colleagues (2020) argue that an individual’s wisdom can vary based on the situation. This contextual orientation finds synergy with the current findings, especially with the emphasis on a leader’s situational awareness. Although our findings is in congruence with Grossmann and colleagues (2020) recognizing the importance of situational dynamics, the present study emphasizes a leader’s situational awareness as a central pillar rather than an ancillary factor.
While there are overlaps between our study and the mainstream Western studies of wisdom, the unique incorporation of technical competence and virtuous dispositions in the decision-making process offers a fresh perspective. It broadens the horizon of understanding wisdom in an organizational setting, particularly in the business-society context.
From this contextual perspective, this study suggests another category of wisdom: executive wisdom. In modern studies of wisdom, diverse approaches (Glück & Weststrate, 2022) to conceptualizing, and the rare empirical attempts at contextualizing, wisdom have yet to provide a persuasive or unified understanding of the application and practicability of wisdom in leadership practice. Notwithstanding this, this study contributes further to the general understanding that people’s practice of wisdom in their daily life may or may not be similar to their conception of wisdom in the leadership contexts. Analogous to the Berlin School’s division of personal and general wisdom (Baltes & Kunzmann, 2004), our findings might suggest another type of wisdom, namely professional and executive wisdom in making decisions in organizational settings. The new type can be called executive wisdom. Executive wisdom differs from personal and general wisdom in that it delimits the operationalization of the concept of wisdom to the context where the person has a leadership or management position that requires a significant level of decision-making based on good judgment. In such an executive (i.e., leadership and/or management) position, the decisions and actions that the person makes have significant impacts on others inside the organization and on stakeholders outside the organization.
Theoretical Contribution
There is continuing interest in examining business practices through a contextualized perspective (Filatotchev et al., 2022). We used the wisdom theoretical lens to contextualize business leaders’ perspectives on what constitutes wise leadership in the business-society interaction, especially when dealing with socially complex problems. Our executive wisdom model seems well suited to the deep contemporary concern with sustainability by providing a fresh perspective to the complexity of climate change responses (Linnenluecke & Griffiths, 2010), and related stakeholder engagement can no longer assume stable environments (Pirson & Turnbull, 2018). These findings have five important implications for theory development.
First, we have furthered a developing movement in wisdom studies to widen the scope of business ethics theory proposed by Provis (2010) and McKenna (2005). Although this process has gained considerable momentum, the core retains the Aristotelian concept of phronēsis, which asserts that excellence in action is the natural outcome of the virtuous person; furthermore, this comes about without necessarily engaging in deliberative thought processes (Finnigan, 2015) because it is embodied (McKenna, 2016). Such a notion rests axiomatically on Aristotle’s statement in the Nicomachean Ethics that “one cannot be practically wise without being good” (Aristotle, 1984: NE 1144a36). The essence of virtue is its “commitment to goodness” (Annas, 2011, p. 105) in all that we do. Phronēsis, for Aristotle, moves beyond mere technē (aptitude, professional/craft knowledge, and expertise). Technē is a “reasoned action underlying the art of production” (Aristotle, 1984: NE 1140a1–a20). Phronēsis “draws on the transcendent . . . to produce wise action” (McKenna & Rooney, 2019, p. 657). In this way, it extends the instrumental rationality of technē by incorporating dispositional and habitual actions “that fulfil the highest human potentialities” (Bragues, 2006, p. 342). This distinction was quite evident in the findings of this research, which were notable for the primacy afforded to technē. Significantly, the respondents did identify five characteristics of a virtuous disposition and also identified the temporal dimension of foresight. Being ethical was identified as a feature of wise decision, which was primarily determined by technē and a virtuous disposition (see Figure 3).
These findings advance our understanding of wisdom in leadership within the business-society context by showing that wisdom is more than just a personality trait or a state of mind. Recent studies of wisdom have significantly contributed to our body of knowledge, including models that aim to describe wisdom-related personality, explain the complexity of wisdom, and offer insights into the measurement of wisdom. The studies have generally leaned toward conceptualizing wisdom as a personality trait (Bauer et al., 2019; Staudinger et al., 2005). This was a prevailing approach in the psychological studies of wisdom in the U.S. and European studies. In organization and business studies too, wisdom is broadly referred to as a fixed and innate characteristic that can be enhanced through reflective learning. However, our study shows that wisdom in the non-Western leadership context seamlessly integrates reflective learning through making decisions that engage technē and a virtuous personality. This finding challenges the idea that individuals’ normative beliefs about the rightness of business-society factors such as CSR are tied to their fundamental personality traits (Mudrack, 2007). This leads to the second implication.
The findings can also help develop more valid and reliable measures that take into account the cultural and contextual aspects of wisdom in leadership and business-society studies. Most wisdom studies use the wisdom scales that have been developed in Western societies. For example, Ardelt’s (2003) 3D-WS is possibly the most frequently used scale in the country under study (Asadi & Intezari, 2020). Our findings revealing that wisdom is conceptualized as highly rational suggests that the three dimensions of the 3D-WS should not be treated as uniformly important; rather, their respective importance may vary across different societies and cultural contexts. For this reason, the 3D-WS model may not be a suitable scale for a non-Western population because in a non-Western society, a leader may be considered unwise if s/he displays affection in their decisions at the expense of rationality. This finding is congruent with the finding of Grossmann et al. (2012) that wisdom is culturally and contextually bound. We, therefore, encourage more inductive examination of leaders’ and laypeople’s perception of wisdom in various cultures and call for contextualized and culturally sensitive scales of wisdom.
A third implication for theory development is that this study provides a non-Western component for use in a comparative analysis with Western cultures. For example, would Western cultures valorize rationality to a similar extent as suggested by the finding of Westaby et al. (2010) that reasons are critically important for leaders rather than a commitment to the common good because they frequently need to justify their decisions within and outside the organization. Our finding shows that wisdom in a non-Western leadership context may be better explained by behavioral reasoning theory, which asserts that context-specific reasons are important in decision-making and behavior, rather than by behavioral intention theories such as the theory of planned behavior. This is consistent with the findings of Shotter and Tsoukas (2014) who highlight the pragmatic qualities of wisdom in leadership. The findings of Dasta et al. (2020) similarly show that people in Iran see wisdom to be more associated with “cognition” than with “spirituality.” While cognition is most evident in the pre-Islam traditions, spirituality is central to the post-Islam conceptions of wisdom.
A fourth significant implication for theory from this research is the conceptual category of ethics in the wise decision sub-core category. From a cultural perspective, it is noted that Western leaders in Intezari and Pauleen (2018) study also included ethics as a core aspect of wise leadership decision-making. Of note here is that Australia and New Zealand (where the Authors’ previous study was conducted) are secular countries, whereas Iran is a hybrid theocratic-republican state with strict moral codes. Yet, ethics rated only relatively moderately as a characteristic of wisdom, and there was no reference to morality or values. Only 54% of the informants identified ethics as an aspect of wisdom. This is not consistent with the Western account of wisdom, which heavily draws upon Aristotle’s work that identifies ethics as a central aspect of wisdom (McKenna, 2005; Pasupathi & Staudinger, 2001). This is particularly significant when one also takes into account the technē-centric bias of the leaders’ conception of wisdom. We would suggest that, given that Phronēsis is the supreme intellectual virtue resting on episteme and technē and that technical expertise alone is insufficient for practical wisdom, the word practical is actually superfluous as all wisdom must ultimately be expressed in practice. The defining difference is the presence of virtue: Phronēsis “is the ability to find some action in particular circumstances which the agent sees as the virtuous thing to do” (Hughes, 2001, p. 105; see also McKenna, Rooney, & Liesch, 2006, pp. 41–43).
The fifth implication that emerges from this research is the concept of a virtuous disposition. It is important that we distinguish the dispositional traits uncovered in this study from the notion of disposition as personality traits, which are “a comprehensive but finite, preferably small set of stable dispositions that remain invariant across situations and that are distinctive for the individual, determining a wide range of important behaviors” (Mischel & Shoda, 1998, p. 231). The most common personality traits are those known as the Big Five (Costa & McCrae, 1997). While one of these traits, openness to experience, is positively related to wisdom (Ardelt et al., 2018), these dispositional traits cannot be considered as virtues. However, it is noteworthy that a later modification of the Big 5 personality scale, Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness (versus Anger), Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience (HEXACO) (Ashton & Lee, 2007), does add the virtues of honesty and humility. By disposition, then, we mean a suite of virtues that a person invariably exhibits in a range of decisions, particularly in important situations that involve value-based judgment, and where any decision is likely to have significant impacts on others and wider society. Such a definition aligns not only with (especially Aristotelian) philosophy (Aristotle, 1984; MacIntyre, 1985) but also with the psychological definition of virtue’s role in wisdom (Baltes & Kunzmann, 2004; Huynh et al., 2017).
This finding has implications for the moral psychology of corporate reputation in that those who act from virtue (i.e., behaving well even when no one is watching) compared to those who act in conformity to virtue (for the sake of personal gain or other egoistic interests) can obtain long-term reputation. This is because, unlike at the firm level, reputation at the individual level is non-instrumental given that it is the outcome of the person’s disposition and character (Alzola, 2019). Comparing the virtuous dispositional traits that emerged from the previous study (Intezari & Pauleen, 2018) and this provides a useful theoretical advance. This is because our findings show a moderating role for virtuous disposition in leadership wisdom. We have identified five components of a virtuous disposition that moderate the relationship between technē and a leader’s wise decision: consultativeness, emotional regulation, reflectiveness, self-awareness, and selflessness. More specifically, being consultative is an indication of intellectual humility; emotional regulation is an indication of equanimity and temperance; reflectiveness and self-awareness indicate (self)honesty; and selflessness indicates a commitment to the well-being of self and others (Vittersø, 2016). Leaders who are consultative are more likely to gain a rational view about their decisions than when they rely on their own individual guesses (Hueffer et al., 2013). That is because people display fewer cognitive biases (Ubel et al., 2011) and tend to decide more rationally when giving advice to others than when making decisions for themselves (Helfinstein et al., 2015; Zou & Savani, 2019). Previous studies also show that dispositions such as emotional regulation (self-control) are associated with reliance on deliberative decision-making and reason (Jordan & Rand, 2018). Jordan and Rand (2018) also report that caring (selflessness) is associated with the pro-social willingness to pay costs to benefit others. The impact of reflection on wise decision-making is also evident in the literature. For example, Brown (2006) states that individuals make prudent decisions when they receive feedback, especially when they are uncertain about the consequences of their actions.
Practical Implications
Our findings have three practical implications. First, a business leader must be technically competent in terms of formal training (knowledge), leavened by experience, and have the capacity for rational thinking. Rational thinking aligns with the virtuous dispositional trait of emotional self-regulation. This finding extends our understanding of the implication of N. W. Katz’s (1979) skills model in a non-Western developed economy. Our findings show that leaders in this specific non-Western context regard technical competence as equal to or more important than social and conceptual competence for a leader to be able to make comprehensive, foresighted, effective, timely, and ethical decisions.
The second practical implication is that an effective business-society interaction requires leaders to have a high level of situational awareness or the capability to understand the context of the problem being addressed. This higher-order cognitive functioning is reinforced by neuroscience: “Wisdom arises as higher-order cognitive regions, such as the prefrontal cortex, work to regulate immediate reward and emotional processing in striatal and cingulate cortex structures” (Williams & Nusbaum, 2016, p. 386). However, there is surprisingly little research on the way in which wisdom is applied according to the circumstances of a particular context. Contextual wisdom is usually concerned with the context of life stages (Staudinger & Kunzmann, 2005) and being (un)wise in different domains of life (Schwartz & Sharpe, 2006; see also the difference of personal and general wisdom in the study by Staudinger, 2013). Recently, some attempts have been made to develop a context-sensitive measure of wisdom, with Brienza and colleagues (Brienza et al., 2018) developing a measure of cognition in wise reasoning. This aspect, the effect of contextual circumstances on the salience of wisdom attributes, suggests a useful area of future research. The third implication relates more generally to socially desirable outcomes. Within an organizational context, developing and sustaining wisdom principles increases the likelihood of pro-social behaviors and decisions (Bangen et al., 2013), which in turn is likely to enhance the propensity of organizations to be socially responsible in their actual practices rather than merely in their declarations and strategies such as greenwashing. Enriching the discourse on political CSR theory, our findings offer pragmatic measures that leaders can employ to avoid populist ideologies about CSR (Al-Esia et al., 2024). This contributes to people’s well-being, we contend. Therefore, the findings can provide insights into developing ethics- or sustainability-oriented executive training programs. Wisdom has been increasingly called for in business and leadership training programs (Maxwell, 2012, 2016).
Limitations and Directions for Future Research
As research on wisdom in a non-Western leadership context has been limited, we used GT methodology to explore the topic in a new context. Our iteration between the field data and the extant literature allowed us to gain new insights into wise leadership in a non-Western society. We also recognize the limitations to our study, which provides opportunities for future studies.
First, the incorporation of demographic information such as gender, industry sector, or managerial levels into this data analysis could have provided a more nuanced understanding of the conception and practice of wisdom among different types of leaders in different types of organizations. A possible avenue of future research might be a comparative examination of wisdom across multiple demographic sections. For example, given that the findings of this study show that technē was considered significant in wisdom, we strongly suggest that future studies examine how the following variables may affect people’s understanding of wisdom: different educational levels; formal and informal general or field-specific training; years of experience; complexity of work; and type of work (e.g., caring industries such as health compared with engineering or IT).
The second limitation is associated with virtuous dispositions. Our data analysis yielded five virtuous dispositions: consultativeness, emotional regulation, reflectiveness, self-awareness, and selflessness. However, we suspect that virtuous dispositions are not stable states and have unequal levels of impact on how a decision-maker relies on his or her technē to make high-quality decisions. We do not have the data to show how the impact of the five virtuous dispositions varies in different situations (e.g., where time is/not limited; where death or serious injury is possible; or where a heightened duty of care is required). We speculate that each virtuous disposition may be different in its degree of impact on the relationship between technē and wise decision across different phases of a decision-making process. The impact can also vary depending on whether a leader makes decisions individually or collectively. Future research can build upon our theorizing by conducting exploratory or confirmatory research about the dynamic and varying impact of the virtuous dispositions.
The third limitation of the study pertains to the sample source. Data were exclusively gathered from one non-Western country, which potentially circumscribes the generalizability of the findings beyond what we have already mentioned in the Introduction, Contextual Background, and Discussion sections. While the study provides invaluable insights into the conceptions of wisdom in leadership and business within this specific cultural context, it is imperative to approach any extrapolations beyond this domain with prudence. The unique socio-cultural, historical, and political nuances of the country (as mentioned in the Contextual Background section) might have profoundly shaped the participants’ perceptions and experiences, which may not be representative of other non-Western or Western contexts. Hence, future research is strongly encouraged to replicate this study in various cultural milieus. Such endeavors would not only enrich the existing literature on wisdom in leadership but also provide a more comprehensive and cross-cultural understanding of the phenomenon and its implication for the cross-cultural business-society dynamics.
Finally, the dominance of religion in the country in which this study was conducted may create the expectation that ethics should have been identified by most participants. Because our study did not test for religiosity, we can only infer that wisdom and religion are independent factors. We cannot make any strong conclusion about the relationship between wisdom and religion based on our data in this study. This is a useful area to explore further in future studies.
Conclusion
The current study, despite its limitations, has investigated the concept of wisdom in leaders’ decision-making as an alternative theoretical lens to the business-society linkage. We have built on previous studies but located our study in a non-Western culture with an advanced economy. By cataloging and inductively analyzing practitioners’ interpretations, this study firmly grounds this “implicit” conceptualization of wisdom in practice and its relation to ethics. In this way, we have contributed to theory by providing a real-life understanding of the concept of wisdom to contemporary studies. By generating a theory grounded in the experience of business leaders, we believe that this study makes a worthwhile contribution to the role of wisdom in ethically responding to a turbulent crisis-driven business-society dynamics that desperately calls out for wisdom. We hope that this study, underlining the significance of traditions and cultures in modern studies of non-Western conceptions of wisdom, will pave the way for further studies on wisdom.
Footnotes
Appendix A: Contextual Background (Further Information)
For over two millennia, Persia, now known as Iran, has been one of the significant cradles of civilization providing a hub of philosophical and scientific thoughts. As one of the oldest civilizations in the world, Iran has a history dating back to 3200 BC. From the early Elamite civilizations to the Achaemenid Empire established by Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BCE, ancient Persia was a significant force in shaping the Near East. At its height, the Achaemenid Empire was one of the largest empires in ancient history. Under rulers like Darius the Great and Xerxes, it spanned three continents, extending from the Indus Valley in the east to the Balkans near modern-day Bulgaria in the west and from Central Asia in the north to the First Cataract of the Nile in Egypt in the south. The empire incorporated a diverse range of cultures, languages, and peoples, and its administrative and road systems were advanced for its time. The Parthian and Achaemenid Empire Subsequent dynasties, such as the Parthians and Sassanians, further entrenched the region’s cultural and political identity.
Throughout its history, Iran has seen the rise and fall of empires; invasions by Greeks, Arabs, Turks, and Mongols; and interactions with neighboring civilizations, each influencing its conception of wisdom. The 7th century saw the Islamic conquest of Persia, leading to the eventual predominance of Islam in the region. Despite the initial cultural shock, the ensuing centuries, especially during the Abbasid Caliphate, witnessed a Persian Renaissance where Persian scholars, scientists, and artists contributed immensely to what is known as the Islamic Golden Age. The Mongol invasion in the 13th century devastated much of Persia, but this was followed by the rise of the Timurids and, subsequently, the Safavids in the 16th century. The Safavid dynasty is particularly notable for establishing Shia Islam as the state religion, a defining feature of Iran’s identity to this day (Browne, 1928).
The 19th and early 20th centuries were characterized by reform, modernization, and increasing European influence related increasingly to controlling Middle Eastern oil. Although the Constitutional Revolution in 1906 failed to establish a constitutional monarchy, the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979) created a degree of western-style modernization. In 1979, amid growing discontent with the monarchy and Western influence, the Islamic Revolution transformed Iran from a monarchy to an Islamic Republic. Consequently, secular policies shifted to ones rooted in religious dogma and governance. While the majority of Iranians are Shia Muslims, the country has a diverse religious landscape, including Sunni Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Baha’is. However, the dominance of Shia clerics in politics since 1979 has led to tensions between religious authorities and reformist or secular segments of the population.
Post-revolution Iran found itself at odds with many Western nations, especially the United States, following events like the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis in 1979. The 1980s were marred by the brutal Iran-Iraq War, during which hundreds of thousands of Iranians died. Iran’s position in the modern geopolitical landscape is marked by its tussles with Western powers and neighboring conflicts. Iran’s nuclear program has been a central point of contention, leading to international sanctions and diplomatic struggles. The ongoing tensions between Iran and the United States, especially after the United States’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, continue to shape the geopolitical narrative. 1
Appendix B: Interview Protocol: Substantive and Theoretically Sensitive Questions
Appendix C: Substantive vs Theoretically Sensitive Questions
In each phase of data gathering, we asked a set of substantive questions as well as a set of theoretically sensitive questions.
To minimize any bias from our preconceived theories during data collection, we asked the substantive questions only in Phase 1. To ensure that no new data emerge, we continued asking the substantive questions prior to the theoretically sensitive questions in all the interviews conducted in Phases 2–5. Figure C1 depicts the combination of the substantive and theoretically sensitive questions asked during all the data collection phases.
Appendix D: Data Gathering and Analytical Process
Using the classic GT, we conducted a recursive process of inductive data collection and analysis, which was followed by a deductive approach (Glaser, 1992; Glaser & Strauss, 1967) to ensure that the conceptualization is not only grounded in the field data but also rooted in and supported by the literature. To remain true to the classic GT, we used the literature only as a conceptual mapping to set the emerging core category in relevant concepts and theories (Giske & Artinian, 2007), not to clarify the data nor to limit our understanding of the data (Glaser, 1992). For this reason, the deductive process began once the core category had emerged purely from the field data. The use of relatively neutral interview questions was vital for ensuring that the questions did not guide data gathering. The interview protocol followed Glaser’s (1998) approach and began by asking open questions such as, “What were your main concerns when making decisions that had to be wise?” and “How did you resolve the concerns?”
The process of data gathering and analysis was iterative. That is, data gathering and analysis took place simultaneously, with data gathering being directed by the emergence of the sub-core categories and the core category (theoretical sensitivity; Glaser, 1978). We collected data, analyzed data, and then decided what data to collect next (theoretical sampling). The new data were compared with the data collected in the previous interviews (constant comparative method; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We continued the data collection-analysis iteration throughout all the interview rounds to elaborate on the explanation of the emerging sub-core categories and core category (Glaser, 1978).
We used passive interviewing with open questions (Glaser, 2003), to minimize the influence of bias from the literature during data collection (Glaser, 1978; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Between each round of the data collection, the interview protocol was modified by adding more theoretically sensitive questions (Glaser, 1978; see Appendix B for the full interview protocol). Data collection and analysis were guided by the research question, “What is the role of wisdom in leadership decision-making?” The data collection process began with generally unstructured interviews and continued with more semi-structured interviews in the later phases, as conceptual categories emerged and theoretical sensitivity increased (see Appendix C).
The interview questions included hypothetical questions as well as real situations faced by informants. An example of a hypothetical question is, “What would be your advice to a novice manager who wants to become a wise leader or act wisely in your organization?” (adopted from Intezari & Pauleen, 2018). An example of a real situation question is, Can you think of a situation where you or someone else have made a decision or taken an action in the last three months, and you consider that decision or actions as (un)wise? When and under what conditions was that incident taken place?
Except for one case that was done on the phone, all interviews were conducted face-to-face. The interviews were conducted in Farsi, which is the formal language of the informants. All interviews were audio-recorded, averaging 1 hour each, and then transcribed by one of the researchers who had conducted the interviews. The transcripts were then sent back to the informants for checking after each interview (informant cross-check). After receiving informants’ confirmation of their transcripts, the transcripts were translated into English verbatim by one of the researchers, who, as Chen and Boore (2010) advocate, must necessarily be fluent in the source and target language, knowledgeable about both cultures, and sufficiently educated in the field of study. This helped to contextualize the narrations (Lopez et al., 2008; Squires, 2009). Using one translator helped maintain translation consistency and enhanced the data analysis reliability (Twinn, 1997). To pinpoint any areas where the translation might not be clear or accurate, the translated and original versions of some of the interviews were randomly cross-checked by another researcher who is also fluent in the source and target languages and expert in the field. The two researchers discussed any discrepancies, ambiguities, or challenges in the translation process. This ensured that the translations are as close as possible to the intended meaning of the original data. The two researchers who were involved in the translation process have studied and lived in English-speaking countries. One has lived in an English-speaking country for 4 years, while the other one has lived in two English-speaking countries for over 15 years and lectured in English. They have returned to Iran on several occasions and read Farsi frequently.
To analyze the data, each researcher individually read the transcriptions without conducting any coding to familiarize themselves with the collected data before entering the coding process. However, we made memo notes that summarized the overall opinion of the participant in relation to the research question. We then open coded the transcripts and entered the codes and their corresponding quotes into Microsoft Office Excel before conducting the subsequent coding (selective and theoretical coding) in Excel. We repeated the process during each round of the data collection (Figure 1).
We used two types of coding: substantive coding and theoretical coding (Glaser, 1978; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Substantive coding consists of open and selective coding. Two of the researchers did open coding independently and cross-checked the codes. We adopted a “negotiated agreement” approach for assessing intercoder reliability (Campbell et al., 2013). The researchers who coded the transcripts compared their codings with each other’s, discussed their disagreements to reconcile codes, and created a final version of the codes dataset. The dataset consisted of as many resolved discrepancies as possible as well as the codes that did not have discrepancies issues. For example, inconsistent codes were discussed and fixed by agreeing on the codes that best represented the representative quotes.
Open coding began with line-by-line coding to “run the data open” and code the data in “every way possible” (Glaser, 1978, p. 56). This helped us to “get out of the data and off the descriptive level to conceptualization” (Glaser, 2011, p. 2). Table D1 illustrates examples of line-by-line coding (including three in vivo codes). For code names, we used in vivo codes (informants’ actual words) and researchers’ knowledge and constantly checked for any possible mismatched quotes by comparing informants’ comments attached to a specific code. Quotations that did not fit were assigned new codes.
Transcripts containing more than one code were assigned more than one code name. For instance, the comment, “Having knowledge and experience per se is insufficient for making wise decisions. Knowledge and experience should be used in line with other capabilities such as controlling emotions, considering ethics, and controlling issues from the viewpoint of reason to be able to lead to wise decisions” was given one code for the first part (“more than knowledge and experience”) and three in-vivo codes for the second sentence (“emotional regulation,” “ethics,” and “rationality”). The same rule was applied to the transcripts that were even less explicit in mentioning codes. For instance, the sentiment “a wise leader applies his experiences and then is able to make a decision on the problem” was assigned three codes: “experience,” “problem-solving,” and “being practical.”
We continued the open coding process by coding different incidents into as many categories as possible (conceptual categories; Glaser, 1978). We constantly compared the codes to each other within and across the interviews in the same interview round (constant comparison) and categorized them under more conceptual terms (Glaser, 1992), which were “more abstract explanatory terms: i.e., conceptual categories” (Strauss & Corbin, 1998, p. 114). The incidents, codes, and categories developed in each interview round were then compared with those of the previous rounds. In this way, we constantly checked the fit of and refitted each code and category, to decide whether a new category should be created or that the existing conceptual categories were adequate (Wastell, 2001). For example, the initial conceptual categories of “making quick decisions” and “avoiding hasty decisions” were aggregated into the conceptual category of “Timely.” As a result, the properties of the initial concepts and categories were refined repeatedly and elaborated through the constant comparison. This categorization refinement is inevitable and necessary as the researcher’s theoretical understanding of the data evolves during the reiteration of data-gathering analysis. Not all open codes could be placed in the emerging conceptual categories. Codes that did not appear more than once during all five interview rounds were excluded from the analysis as the codes did not appear to be a concern for all other informants. For example, because “understanding the meaning of life” was mentioned by only one informant and did not appear again in the following data analysis, we did not incorporate the codes into the development of the core category. A total of 217 codes were excluded, leading to 1,093 codes to be used in the analysis.
Moreover, as was the case with conceptual codes, some conceptual categories could fit in with more than one sub-core category. For example, “selflessness” could be categorized under either “virtuous disposition” or “decision quality.” We considered “selflessness” as an aspect of the sub-core category of “virtuous disposition” because most informants had referred to “selflessness” as a disposition and/or a behavioral characteristic of wise leaders (Figure D1). Overall, 14 conceptual categories were identified.
To identify the relationships between structure and process, and the links between categories and sub-core categories, we applied Glaser’s (1978, 2005) theoretical coding families, the six C’s, which include six coding questions aimed at revealing the “causes” (reasons behind the observed phenomenon), “consequences” (the effects of the observed phenomenon), “contingency” (moderating role of the phenomenon and/or other phenomena in the occurrence of the observed phenomenon), “condition” (time, place, and duration), “covariance” (correlation between categories), and “context” of the phenomenon under study. Other coding families that were used in this study include process, degree of variance, dimensions, self-identity, means-goal, cultural and social aspects, consensus, mainline, theoretical families, ordering families, unit families, reading families, and models (Glaser, 1978, pp. 75–82). We used the theoretical coding families as a guideline but avoided enforcing them on the data.
Table D2 shows the frequency and percentage of the informants who identified a particular conceptual category. Three sub-core categories were identified: technē, wise decision, and virtuous disposition. Four conceptual categories constitute technē: knowledge, experience, rationality, and situational awareness (each being identified by 97.1%, 94.3%, 91.4%, and 71.4% of the informants, respectively). Wise decision consists of five conceptual categories: comprehensive, effective, foresighted, timely, and ethical (each being identified by 94.3%, 68.6%, 65.7%, 62.9%, and 54.3, respectively). Virtuous disposition includes five conceptual categories: consultative, emotional regulation, self-awareness, reflectiveness, and selflessness (each being identified by 80.0%, 77.1%, 71.4%, 68.6%, and 54.3%, respectively).
Throughout the data collection and analysis process, we used memo writing and mapping to keep track of any emerging ideas and codes, as well as possible relationships between and among codes, categories, and sub-core categories. We did so to minimize the influence of our bias on the emergence of the core category (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Moreover, to ensure theoretical sensitivity and identify patterns among incidents throughout the data collecting and analyzing process, we kept asking three questions that Glaser (1978, p. 57) suggests: “What is this data a study of?” “What category does this incident indicate?” “What is actually happening in the data?” In some cases, participants used different terms to convey an idea. In these cases, we coded the statements based on the contextual meaning, not the term. For example, in the following statement, the participant means “irrational,” not “non-rational”: “I also think of non-rational decisions and seek to reform them so as not to embarrass others.” We coded the statement “Avoiding irrational decisions.”
By the end of Round 3 of data collection (after almost 20 interviews), the sub-core categories began to emerge, which delimited subsequent data collection and coding to the occurrences (i.e., sentences, phrases, specific words) that were relevant to the emerging sub-core categories. From this point on, we analyzed the data in a more focused way (i.e., selective coding; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). This was continued until the core category and its theoretical intercategorical connections were sufficiently elaborated and integrated (i.e., theoretical coding; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We kept on moving back and forth between data gathering, coding, and data interpretation (analytic induction) until the emerging core category became strongly grounded in the field data (Binder & Edwards, 2010) and no new categories emerged relating to the core and sub-core categories. The whole process of data collection and analysis led to a rich and dense core category that integrated and explained the relationship among the sub-core categories.
Appendix E: Exemplary First-Level Excerpts and Memos
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
