Leadership

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.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have renewed debates about the future of leadership, in particular the nature of the relationship between human leaders and intelligent machines. The literature tends to portrays human-machine relations in complementary terms: the machine does the data analysis and the number crunching while the leader makes the decisions, guided by their unique vision, gut-feeling, and inner moral compass. Drawing on the historical metaphor of the Mechanical Turk, the paper complicates this division of labour in two main ways. First, we revisit the influence of game theory on business thinking in order to question whether leadership has ever relied solely on uniquely human faculties such as intuition, vision, or moral judgment. Instead, we suggest that leadership has long been shaped by the algorithmic logic of strategic optimization. Second, we show that AI is becoming adept at simulating human leadership, a capability that makes it tempting to outsource traditional leadership functions to a computerized system. We warn that this dynamic risks producing a reversal of the Mechanical Turk: not a machine concealing human intelligence, but rather a human concealing machine intelligence. We conclude by arguing that AI, understood as a socio-technical system, is currently reshaping what leadership is and how it is enacted in organizations.

This article contributes to critical leadership studies by building on Dennis Tourish’s (2023) call to confront the authoritarian and fascistic dimensions of contemporary leadership. Focusing on the case of an Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, it explores how emotional control, symbolic performance, and epistemic closure are used to consolidate power within democratic façades. While dominant leadership theories often celebrate charisma and moral vision, this paper critiques their normative assumptions by showing how such traits can legitimise exclusion and suppress dissent. Through a critical analysis of Edi Rama’s leadership, this article illustrates how populist authority is sustained through affective and narrative practices. In doing so, it extends current debates by offering a non-Western case that highlights how democratic structures may enact authoritarian-populist rule.