Rethinking ethical leadership: A philosophical anthropology of moral complexity and organizational power

Abstract

Ethical leadership has emerged as a salient construct in management scholarship, often portrayed as a panacea for organisational deviance. Dominant thinking, however, reduces it to a fixed repertoire of traits or prescriptive virtues, while ignoring the moral complexities, power relations, and contextual contingencies that shape ethical action in practice. Whereas ethics-as-practice work has developed a relational and situated account of morality, this article introduces philosophical anthropology as a bridging perspective that further places human vulnerability, moral agency, and culturally mediated judgment in the foreground of leadership. This paper presents a unique theoretical framework, which differs from other studies that only criticize or focus on micro-social dynamics. The proposed framework recasts ethical leadership as an emergent process. This process is embedded within lived experience, organisational configurations, and conflicting moral imperatives. Based on philosophical, classical and modern thought, the framework resists dominant trait-based presuppositions yet is sensitive to the moral realities facing leaders in complicated institutions. The paper concludes by summarising the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications for creating more context-sensitive and critically informed theories of ethical leadership.