Introduction

To seek to write a book about leadership might seem audacious, especially if one considers the thousands of scientific and professional works that already exist on the subject, some of them written by well-known authors such as Peter Drucker, Daniel Goldman, John Kotter, Abraham Zaleznik, and Peter Senge. The distinctive nature of the subject in question, namely, ethical leadership in particular, prompted me to rise to the challenge.

During my doctoral studies, at the beginning of the 1990s, I decided to delve deeper into this concept by looking initially at whether Quebec’s school managers were practicing their leadership with a certain ethical dimension. Later, with the aid of research grants from FQRSC (Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture) and from CRSH (Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines), I was able to follow up my analysis with a variety of leaders, mostly from the public sector.

My reflections took root in a Canadian context and are based especially on public sector managers working in education and in health. To date, I have interviewed over two hundred men and women with the goal of defining the contours of ethical leadership exercised in a situation of moral dilemma. Notions such as ethical sensitivity, professional judgment, and responsibility lie at the heart of this leadership. Of course, I cannot claim that the characteristics of an ethical decision outlined in this book are applicable to other environments and cultures. To draw more general conclusions, it would, of course, be necessary to carry out scientific research on diverse groups of people.

This book broadly traces the architecture of ethical leadership that I was able to observe in the individuals I interviewed. As I sought to construct an ethical model, I attempted to explain what ethical leadership is, and I endeavoured to understand the many challenges to its application in the workplace. Ethical questions are increasingly in evidence in scientific literature, especially since the 1990s. The demand for ethical leadership is fuelled by a variety of social elements: scandals of all sorts, issues arising from scientific advances, practices lacking in probity, and innovations in nanotechnologies, among others. For some, the notion of ethical leadership seems a utopia, owing to such current trends as the growth of a free market economy, the quest for performance without regard for the human element, individualistic patterns of behaviour, and complete disregard for environmental consequences.

My research led me to conclude, however, that ethical leadership is alive and well and that it takes various forms. It can be tinted by legal and regulatory frameworks, in conformity with established norms; it can be coloured by a desire to create a more human organization, in the pursuit of greater social justice; it can be imbued with personal moral values that drive conduct and decisions.

Seeking to practice ethical leadership can give the impression of swimming against the current of a society bent on a cult of performance and the logic of personal interest. To actualize ethical leadership requires repositioning ourselves towards a more positive conception of human nature. Ethical leadership challenges the conscience of the individual by inviting reflection on the actions to be taken and the commitment to an ethical perspective. Ethical leadership makes no noise, but it leaves its marks.

My reflections are based particularly on research carried out since I completed my doctoral thesis. My ideas have been refined by exchanges with other researchers working in this field and by discussions with my students in a seminar on ethics and decision making. The students not only contributed their own ideas to the developing body of knowledge on the concept, but they also pushed me to clarify my thinking further and to root it in daily life. I thank them with all my heart.

This work does not claim to be the most exhaustive of all the studies carried out on ethical leadership and the ethical decision-making process. Rather, it attempts to lay bare the facts by sorting, simplifying, and ordering the existing mass of data in order to delineate the contours of ethical leadership, to map its exercise in a decision-making process, and to understand its tensions in the workplace. This book offers a synthesis of all the interviews, field surveys, and research I have carried out on ethical leadership and decision making over the past ten years. Having already written articles that draw on the interviews I conducted, I wanted, in this book, to extract the substance of those interviews and combine it with various research data in order to provide a bigger picture. The organizing principle here turns on one central question: How does ethical leadership practice, define, and shape the ethical decision-making process?

This book presents the comments and ideas of recognized authors but also of the students and experienced managers who attended my seminars on ethical decision making. What they had to say inspired me greatly. Unfortunately, I could include only a few of their observations here, although I will retain the rest for future writing projects.

The individuals I interviewed offer a glimpse into all our struggles with our current society—its uncertainty, its transitory nature, the pressures of the market economy—and their ethical reflections and existential questioning point to new values emerging from this struggle. Faced with this realization, I thought it best to localize the questions on the basis of two currently colliding trends, namely the modern and the postmodern. Without dwelling at length on the philosophical foundations of these trends, I will attempt to draw out from the interviews elements that bring significant tension into professional life. Accordingly, I would propose the following epistemological division: the modern tradition, which sees the world through the prism of instrumental rationality, followed by a postmodern outlook that shatters the traditional notion of rationality. These thinking patterns will allow us to focus our vision of leadership and to describe the development of ethical preoccupations within leadership in broad terms.