ALLOWING EXCEPTIONS

The argument of the previous chapter challenged one familiar way of grounding the special moral status of leaders. Trait views of leadership, as well as virtue theories of ethics with which they are associated, ignore the tendency of leaders to exaggerate how special they are in terms of their personal characteristics. Because of these tendencies, we should be especially wary of leaders who appeal to particular traits and virtues to justify their rule-breaking behavior.

To the student of leadership, it will come as little surprise to learn that if leaders do have special moral status, then this status cannot be derived simply from the qualities of leaders themselves. Moral and political analyses of leadership long ago turned their attention to the nature of the relationships between leaders and followers – for example, to the ethical importance of “the consent of the governed.” Leader-centric approaches to the empirical study of leadership have also gone out of favor, at least in part because of their failure to attend to the role of followers in the leadership process. Whether prescriptive or descriptive in nature, most contemporary work on leadership recognizes that leadership is a complex phenomenon, one that involves more than individual leaders and their personal characteristics.

The search for an answer to the central question of leadership ethics – Do the distinctive features of leadership justify rule-breaking behavior? – must therefore expand the potential grounds of justification for rule-breaking behavior by leaders and consider group-centric approaches.