Ethics,alterity and the rationality of leadership justice

Introduction

Leadership justice is a significant area of research in management theory (Colquitt and Greenberg, 2003). Central to this research have been considerations of how a leader’s just treatment of their followers is of critical importance to ethical leadership (Sendjaya et al., 2008). It is widely accepted that leaders are ‘important sources of fairness and unfairness in organizations’ (van Knippenberg et al., 2007: 131) and that achieving just outcomes is central to the leadership function. This function is said to operate such that perceptions of justice in organizations can improve leadership influence and effectiveness (Janson et al., 2008). In such a formulation, while couched in ethical terms, ensuring justice is paramount to increasing the likelihood of achieving organizational outcomes (Colquitt et al., 2001) such as job performance (Walumbwa et al., 2009) and ultimately business success (Den Hartog and De Hoogh, 2009).

This article questions such approaches to leadership justice, arguing that they embody an unquestioned managerialism (see Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007) that, while speaking the language of ethics and justice, actually considers justice largely from an instrumental perspective. It is suggested that leadership justice research serves as an attempt to establish a particular set of pro-managerial relations between followers and leaders as being natural and desirable (Robinson and Kerr, 2009). The article analyses these relations in terms of the particular organizational rationalities that they are based on. This shows that, using the Weberian (1978) distinction, dominant approaches understand leadership justice as a formal organizational rationality, yet one with no substantive ethical content. Further, these approaches to leadership justice embody an ‘ethics of manliness’ (Bologh, 1990: 142): a masculine form of rationality that castigates values associated with love, care and affectual relationships as being feminine and irrelevant to life in organizations. It is argued that the instrumental rationality of justice participates in a masculine ‘economy of contract and exchange’ (Diprose, 2002: 10) where justice is traded for organizational commitment and effectiveness.

Turning to the ethical philosophy of Levinas (1969, 1998), the article responds by outlining the possibilities of justice for leadership based on a primary respect for the alterity of other people – their absolute particularity and difference from oneself. With this approach, rational reciprocation and exchange are supplanted by pre-rational affective relationships between people as the very basis of ethically informed justice. The article situates leadership in relation to a ‘difficult justice’ (see Horowitz and Horowitz, 2006), where the demands of all of the others cannot be met. What follows is that ethics is necessary for justice, but it is always compromised because the multiple ethical demands faced by leaders put them in a position where ethical attention is always divided. This justice is not so much a matter of the rational pursuit of ‘effectiveness’ but a relational demand that is endemic to the very nature of leadership – a dilemma not just of what to do, but of to whom one should turn one’s ethical attention. The article considers the implications of this for the everyday practice of leadership justice, focusing especially on how pursuing justice involves grappling with impossible ethical anxieties, dilemmas and contradictions. Justice is recast from being a leadership skill or behaviour to leadership itself being the practice of justice.

The ends of leadership justice

Research into justice and fairness perceptions in organizations gathered steam from the 1960s and 1970s to a point now where it is a mainstay of management theory (van Knippenberg et al., 2007). In that time, theories of organizational justice have been developed in relation to what are claimed to be its three distinct ‘dimensions’ (Byrne and Cropanzano, 2001; Colquitt et al., 2005). The first, distributive justice, refers to the ways in which resources are, or are not, perceived to be distributed fairly in organizations (Deutsch, 1985). The second, procedural justice, is the extent to which employees feel that the processes used for the distribution of resources are administered fairly (Thibaut and Walker, 1975). The third, interactional justice, is about how fairly people feel they are treated in interpersonal interactions in organizations (Bies and Moag, 1986). For each of these dimensions, justice has been predominantly researched in terms of the extent to which people perceive that they are treated fairly in and by their organizations and leaders (Cropanzano and Stein, 2009). Cropanzano and Stein (2009) confirm that ‘[o]rganizational justice research generally understands fairness [justice] as a subjective perception by a person or persons [… and that …] a workplace event is ‘‘fair’’ or ‘‘unfair’’ because an individual or individuals believes it to be so’ (p. 195).

What is explained explicitly in the literature is the idea that justice is a ‘heuristic’ with which followers make judgements about whether they ‘can rely on a given leader to lead them to ends that are good for the collective, rather than just good for the leader’ (Janson et al., 2008: 251). At first glance this would seem to be making the claim that leaders interested in justice are genuinely other-focused – assuring collectively that the just treatment of followers is a goal in and of itself. This assumption, while often stated explicitly, is subject to contradiction within the literature. This becomes apparent when the relationship between what is understood as the collective good and what is understood as good for the leader is considered. It has been asserted that:

The main question in leadership research has always been what makes leaders influential and effective […] Inspired by research in organizational justice […] in recent years leadership research has increasingly engaged with the notion that to answer this question we need to understand the role of leader fairness. (van Knippenberg and De Cremer, 2008: 173)

There is a circular reasoning at play in that on the one hand just leadership is stated as being about a concern for the good of others and the collective good, but on the other hand what is claimed to be the value of enacting leadership justice is that it has a ‘substantial impact on the evaluation and effectiveness of leaders’ (Janson et al., 2008: 252). However, in the performative nature of contemporary organizations what might be closer to the heart of a leader’s own interests than his or her personal/organizational effectiveness? Indeed, a core research direction in the organizational justice literature is the investigation of ‘the unique effects of justice dimensions on key outcomes’ (Colquitt et al., 2001: 86). Justice is thus offered initially as a genuine concern for others, but this is subsequently revealed not as a goal to be valued in itself but as a step towards a different set of subsequent outcomes. The kind of outcomes that perceptions of leadership justice are thought to result in ‘include greater trust and commitment, improved job performance, more helpful citizenship behaviours, improved customer satisfaction, and diminished conflict’ (Cropanzano et al., 2007: 34) – all of which mean that followers ‘perform better, [and] are less likely to leave the company’ (de Cremer et al., 2006: 555). This is thought to be desirable because ‘in groups and organizations it is often crucial that members devote extra time, energy and effort to interdependent tasks and actions that benefit the group or organization’ (de Cremer and van Knippenberg, 2003: 858). The managerialist logic of leadership justice is laid bare – beneath the veneer of claims that justice is undertaken for others, it is evident that justice is really valued because it makes people work harder in pursuing non-justice-related organizational imperatives. As a corollary, leaders should pursue justice not as a goal in its own right but as a means through which to achieve ‘effectiveness’ (Cho and Dansereau, 2010). In other words, justice is subordinated to managerial power and organizational success through a rational and instrumental formulation where justice is the means, and organizational effectiveness is the end that is truly valued.

There is a sleight of hand here that surfaces the subconscious (or at least non-explicit) rational managerialism of much leadership theory. The circular reasoning is achieved by first claiming that leaders should be other-centred or even self-sacrificial (de Cremer et al., 2004), and next to assume uncritically that the interests of the others, collectively understood, align unproblematically with the organizational interests that the leader is supposed to represent anyway. If a leader is fair, it is argued, s/he might be better accepted by the followers (Janson et al., 2008) as well as being able to make them cooperate more effectively (de Cremer and van Knippenberg, 2003) – all of this ultimately serving the achievement of the (non-justice-related) goals that the leader is employed to achieve. The position is that ‘[l]eader fairness can be reliably linked to behavioural outcomes’ such as performance and commitment (van Knippenberg et al., 2007: 129) and that ‘justice perceptions have been shown to have effects on people’s motivation, well-being, performance, attitudes, behaviours and other outcomes relevant for organizations and organizational members’ (Fortin, 2008: 93). Also identified as organizationally relevant outcomes of employee perceptions of justice are: discouragement of disruptive behaviour, promotion of the acceptance of organizational change, reinforcement of the sense of trustworthiness of people in positions of authority, reduction of people’s fear of being exploited, provision of incentives for worker cooperation, as well as satisfaction of individual needs for control, esteem and belonging (Colquitt et al., 2005: 5–6).

It has also been suggested that the perception of whether a leader is interpersonally just is directly related to whether that leader is seen as transformational. Such leaders can ‘transform people’s motives and actions from the personal to the collective or organizational level’, in turn influencing ‘employees’ organizational citizenship behaviour, performance, and organizational commitment’ (De Cremer et al., 2007: 1798). Conversely, when the outcomes an employee receives from the organization are perceived to be unjust, leaders who ‘display behaviours that are perceived as valuable and useful towards the interest of the organization and its employees’ (De Cremer et al., 2004: 473) can mitigate the negative effects of that sense of injustice.

While circular reasoning might be criticized in terms of its logical fallaciousness, in the case of leadership justice the more serious criticism is that it acts as a means to use justice as a device for manipulating followers into consent in the name of the collective good as it is defined by organizational elites. Janson et al. (2008: 267) propose that ‘new leaders may find it very useful to engage their followers early on by enacting some noticeable act of fairness’. The declared imperative is that leaders should perform dramatic acts to demonstrate justice, not that they should be just on the basis of any moral or ethical imperative. Concomitantly, ‘ethical leadership in organizations is increasingly portrayed as crucial for sustained success in today’s business world and recent scandals demonstrate that a lapse in ethics at the top can be costly for organizations’ (Den Hartog and De Hoogh, 2009: 200).

Despite the complexity of methods and analysis brought to bear on the positivistic pursuit of the study of justice and leadership, its managerial ethos goes without any difficult ethical questions being asked – this posits that primarily it is the organization to whom ethical responsibility is owed. Further, this serves to justify the managerialist rationality mentioned earlier – the idea that organizations can and should enforce their will manipulatively on others for their own good and that ‘justice’ is just another weapon in the arsenal used in the policing of that enforcement. Indeed, it can be said that research into leadership justice shares with much study of leadership the dangerous assumption that ‘given a favourable personality and a conducive situation then subordinates act simply as objects […] to be manipulated like so much machinery’ (Ashman, 2007: 97). When this is the case justice is reduced to being a rational means to that end rather than being valued in and of itself.

The rationality of leadership justice

Why is it then that the ‘state of the art’ (van Knippenberg et al., 2007) of leadership justice is informed by a rationality whereby justice is used as a means to enhance organizational self-interest? This question can be approached by considering the relationship between what Weber (1978) calls formal rationality and substantive rationality. Formal rationality is the application of ‘quantitative calculation or accounting’ (p. 85), often in monetary terms, for the achievement of particular goals. Bureaucratic organizing is the core example of the application of such formal rationality, in that rules and routines aim to achieve ‘the most precise and efficient means for the resolution of problems’ (Kalberg, 1980: 1158). By contrast, substantive rationality refers to ‘economically oriented action under some criteria […] of ultimate values’ (Weber, 1978: 85). With substantive rationality, the goals pursued by formal rationality are evaluated and justified by an ‘extrinsic standard of value-rationality’ (Eisen, 1978: 64). Thus, formal rationality determines the most efficient way to achieve goals, while substantive rationality relates to the values that go into determining or assessing what the goals should be.

In the corporate ‘life-world’ imagined in leadership justice theory there is a particular interplay of rationalities. Here, justice is a means rather than an end – it is formally rational (see du Gay [2000] on justice and bureaucracy). The substantive goal being pursued with non-rational commitment is economic value as achieved by organizational effectiveness. This reflects a hybridized rather than a classic bureaucracy (Courpasson, 2000; Courpasson and Clegg, 2006) – one couched within a neo-liberal culture that prizes the pursuit of self-interest and valorizes business success as an ethical end (Harvey, 2005) and its ‘ultimate value’ (Weber, 1978). Justice is located in the formally rational pursuit of organizational effectiveness understood in terms of calculable financial success in a competitive market place. This reflects the general tendency in leadership studies where ‘researchers’ overriding concern is with managerial effectiveness instead of social critique’ (Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007: 1333). The imperative given to leaders is to ensure that their followers do not feel they are being treated unfairly so that the leader can better achieve his or her organizational goals (see Fortin, 2008).

This approach refracts Weber’s focus on formal rationality in that much of management theory has assumed, in the wake of Weber, that organizations are incubators for ‘cold rationality’ beholden to act ‘without hatred or passion, and hence without affection or enthusiasm’ (Weber, 1948: 225). Managers are imagined to be ‘logical, reasoned, rational decision makers’ (Muchinsky, 2000: 802) who reject any form of heightened emotion as feminine and unnecessary (Fournier and Kelemen, 2001; see Acker, 1990). In practice, however, this is somewhat unrealistic. As Willmott (2011) explains, ‘Weberian ‘‘personality’’ is forged through a continuous struggle to live a life that is framed and informed by reason, yet critically is fully cognizant of a morally charged obligation recurrently to renew and enact a non-rational commitment to particular values’ (p. 259). Weber (1948) recognizes that love (understood by him in relation to fraternity) is in conflict with rationally ordered institutions, suggesting also that ‘the split usually becomes wider the more the values of the world have become rationalized’ (p. 330) and that this tension has ‘been most obvious in the economic sphere’ (p. 331). Capitalism is the most extreme form of this, Weber (1978) contends, given the monetary calculability and impersonality that characterize economic relationships. In such conditions the institutionalization of formal rationality strips the pursuit of wealth of ethical meaning, rendering people ‘specialists without spirit’ (p. 182).

The cynicism this portends, for Weber, is one where the pursuit of economic goods is decreed like a fate, and where economic order is characterized by the loveless impersonality of the iron cage (Weber, 1958a). With such fatalism, substantive and formal rationality are ‘always in principle separate things’ (Weber, 1978: 108) addressing ‘largely distinct problems’ (p. 111). The consequence, for Weber (1958b), is that:

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. (p. 134)

There is a distinctly gendered dimension to Weber’s resignation to the fate of modernity, one that Bologh (1990) sharply critiques as an ‘ethics of manliness’ (p. 42) characterized by the privileging of ‘greatness’ and achievement over ‘love’, care and relationality, as well as the separation between them. For Weber the sad end of the rationalized world is one where the ‘means-end pursuit of material interests’ and the ‘subordination of value-rationality to instrumental rationality’ results in disenchantment and nihilism (Gane, 2002: 2). This masculine ethos normalizes rationality by separating it from affect, the latter being sequestered into the private and feminized sphere of the home (Bologh, 1990) – the manager is the ‘man of reason’ (Lloyd, 2002). Bologh criticizes Weber as privileging masculine rational action so as to subordinate ‘substantive, ethical, human values and ends’ to a ‘formal, bureaucratic, capitalist, calculating rationality’ (p. 122). Moreover, if instrumental rationality means institutionalizing the procedures that are most effective in achieving organizational goals then leadership justice theory embodies the normative proposition that justice itself should be included as a part of this rational calculus. It is this separation between public/organizational life as rational and private/domestic life as irrational and affective that Bologh argues imbues Weber’s thought with a deep-seated privileging of masculinity. One of the results of this is a ‘desire for a loving world’ being replaced by a ‘(manly) politically “realistic” and “rational” attitude’ (p. 136). Leadership justice participates in this attitude.

It is worth noting that in recent years there have been numerous arguments suggesting that leadership either has or should become feminized. With this feminization, leadership focuses increasingly on ‘participatory, non-hierarchical, flexible and group-oriented’ practices that are often, if not problematically, associated with feminine stereotypes (Due Billing and Alvesson, 2000: 144). Feminine leadership is promoted as being able to ‘humanize’ the workplace through practices infused with ‘empathy, intuition, relatedness, nurturing and cooperation’ (Edlund, 1992: 81) and values such as ‘building relationships, communication, consensus building, power as influence, and working together for a common purpose’ (Trinidad and Normore, 2005: 574). At first glance this seems aligned with Bologh’s (1990) call for a form of sociality based on ‘love, loyalty and nurturance’ (p. 323). Despite its valorization of the feminine, on closer inspection feminine leadership has remained rationalized in the sense described earlier. Even though it evokes ethico-feminine categories such as care, love and so forth, it still privileges rationalization in that: ‘feminine leadership seeks to arouse awareness of and appreciation for the contributions feminine leadership can make’ such that ‘when the workplace is humanized, organizations are more effective’ (Edlund, 1992: 87). At its most sanguine, the claim is that ‘women are more likely than men to lead in a style that is effective under contemporary conditions’ (Eagly and Carli, 2003: 807). This focus on ‘effectiveness’ in studies of feminine leadership (Eagly, 2007) resounds in studies that have devoted themselves to establishing whether men or women have some ‘gender advantage’ when it comes to producing results (Vecchio, 2002). In this sense the so-called feminization of leadership simply serves to bolster existing masculine organizational rationality as it seeks its ultimate justification in ‘more sales, better market share, and to take away from competitors’ (Calas and Smirchich, 1993: 79).

Ethics in the name of the other

Having considered leadership ethics in relation to Weber’s thought, it can be surmised that contemporary approaches to leadership justice remain very much connected with a Weberian rational ideal. Seen in this way, the substantive rationality of organizations rests in the valuing of organizational effectiveness, business success and, more generally, organizational ‘greatness’. With the prizing of this substantive rationality, justice is relegated to being a variable within the calculus of formal rationality. Moreover, conceiving of justice this way disparages as feminine any non-rational or non-instrumental values that might be associated with justice. On this basis justice becomes divorced from ethics with, after Bologh (1990), justice being located on the privileged side of rational, masculine, public life and ethics being on the side of irrational, feminine, private life.

The critique of managerialist approaches to leadership justice outlined above is not a reason to give up on justice as it relates to leadership. What it calls for is a way of thinking about organizational justice from a more genuinely other-centred approach that does not subjugate justice to organizational self-interest, does not privilege justice over ethics, and does not rest on the implicit assumption of the primacy of self-interest and its cold hearted manipulative pursuit through instrumental rationality in a masculine ‘economy of contract and exchange’ (Diprose, 2002: 10). Within such an economy the implicit contract is that if the leader provides justice, this should be reciprocated by followers in the form of commitment to the organization and its substantive goals. Under such an arrangement ‘sociability is reducible to an exchange economy of ‘rational minds’ where […] justice [is] subject to calculation and expectation of return’ (Diprose, 2002: 184) – precisely the form of masculinism of which Bologh (1990) warns.

To consider an alternative form of leadership justice the ethical philosophy of Levinas is now turned to as a guide to how leadership might overcome its self-preoccupation (see Knights and O’Leary, 2006) and privileging of masculine-instrumental organizational rationality. As Diprose (2002: 117) suggests, Levinas is an especially valuable source for such considerations in that his work challenges ‘the ideals of reason and autonomy’ that dominate the ‘ethics of manliness’ (Bologh, 1990: 42) that characterizes dominant accounts of leadership justice. While Levinas’s philosophy cannot be regarded as a feminist ethic, its value here resides in the primacy it places on alterity and the pre-rational, affective caring relations between people being the font of ethics and justice (Borgerson, 2007). What Levinas offers is an approach that rather than separating justice and ethics into different spheres of life explores the relations between them as being intractable.

Turning to Levinas for a response to the gendered critique of rationalized leadership justice brings into question the status of the feminine in his work. There have been varied reactions to this, most especially in feminist theory (see Chanter, 2001), where Levinas’s ideas have been responded to both affirmatively and negatively (Sandford, 2002). The focus in this article remains on drawing on Levinas so as to conceptualize justice in a manner that does not rationalize it through masculine ‘economies of exchange’ (Diprose, 2002). With this purpose in mind, it is noteworthy that the ‘femininity’ associated with Levinas’s theory can be seen not so much as a feature of ‘empirical women’ (Sandford, 2002) but rather as an ethical association where ‘the absolute, absolutely originary welcome, indeed the pre-original welcome, the welcoming par excellence, is feminine’ (Derrida, 1999: 45). Following Chalier’s (1991) re-reading of Levinas, the feminine is understood as that ‘which puts into question the easy conscience of […] rationality and self-conceit’ (p. 122). Such an ethics is rooted in being ‘devoted to the Other before being devoted to itself’ (p. 126). Ethics begins with alterity.

For Levinas, justice must always be premised on ethics, such that to strive to do justice is inspired by an ethical concern for other people. Levinas does not use the term ethics to refer to some system of rational procedures, practices or dispositions that can ensure a sense of ‘goodness’ or righteousness on the part of one who adheres to them. Neither does he develop a set of prescriptions or values intended to guide or inform how people might live or respond to situations in which they find themselves. Instead, Levinas’s project is to delve into the very meaning of ethics – his is a ‘proto-ethics’ (Llewelyn, 1995: 4) that attempts an ‘ethics of ethics’ (Derrida, 1978/2001: 138) as they might give rise to a Weberian notion of ‘ultimate values’. Coming back to Weber (1978), value-rational action involves the ‘clearly self-conscious formulation of the ultimate values governing the action’ (p. 25) as opposed to being ‘affectual’ – the latter being characterized by Weber as an ‘emotional surrender’ (p. 33) to ‘household communism’ (p. 153) that should be set aside by a masculine oriented rationality. For Weber, affectual values are understood as follows: ‘Eros, ecstasy and emotion represent the threat of losing control: loss of mastery, loss of rationality, loss of manliness’ (Bologh, 1990: 140). In contrast, for Levinas it is the ethical-affectual basis of rational action that is given primary importance, recognizing that rationality and emotion cannot be regarded as mutually exclusive and belonging to different spheres of life.

Levinas’s approach to ethics eschews the masculinist privileging of rationality central to the critique of dominant approaches to leadership justice canvassed earlier, instead locating ethics in pre-rational and affectual relations with ‘the other’. Levinas’s ethics is conceived in the face-to-face relation between people where the other person, as a ‘face’, is always regarded as radically different to the self. For Levinas, ‘the face of the other person is not the appearance of the other person; it is not a collection of features given to visual perception’ (Morgan, 2007: 67) but rather signals both the absolute particularity and unknowability of the other person as well as our responsibility to that person. As Levinas (1969) explains, ‘the relation with the face is not an object-cognition’ (p. 75) that can be apprehended within a system of knowledge, but signals a transcendence that puts the self into question. In more practical terms, the relationship with the face is ‘a dimension of human social experience that complements our existence as natural human beings and introduces the sense of value and goodness that we believe human life has’ (Morgan, 2007: 84).

Levinas holds extreme respect for the sanctity of the other person – a sanctity so revered that it never assumes that the other person can ever really be known in a rational way, nor that the other person should ever be put at my service. While I may be face-to-face with another, at the same time that other is infinitely different from me and certainly not capturable in any categories that I might choose to apply to him or her. For Levinas, it is the awe inspired by this ‘infinity’ that gives rise to ethics – the absolute respect for the other person in face-to-face proximity, and where that other comes first. The ethical relation that Levinas elaborates is quite different from how ‘normal’ relations between people might be understood. Ethics is certainly not about exploiting others or about using them for one’s own advantage through systems of instrumental rationality. Neither is it about reciprocity and fair exchange – making sure that each person puts in and gets repaid the same amount from relationships. Ethics instead is an out-of-balance relationship – one that puts the other person first in the name of generosity, respect and humility. Ethics is a kind of giving without taking or expecting anything in return. This ethics, the meaning of ethics, is like a love that gives freely without thought of the pursuit of self-advantage or repayment – precisely the love that is castigated from the public sphere in masculine forms of rationality (Bologh, 1990) common to leadership justice theory.

Levinas describes the self as being hostage to the other. With ethics the self is not secure in its righteousness but is called into question by alterity – ‘by the presence of the Other’ (Levinas, 1969: 43). It is the other person who calls into question the very idea that one might live one’s life just for the purpose of satisfying selfish needs and desires. The ethical self is a vulnerable self – a self vulnerable to other people. With this ‘[G]oodness consists in taking up a position in being such that the other counts more than myself’ (Levinas, 1969: 47). For Levinas, ethics involves an incessant questioning of the self by the other without self-righteous tranquillity – this is a questioning that marks out an ‘unfulfillable obligation’ (Levinas, 1994: 150). Levinas’s ethics is a very tall order – an ethics that seems almost impossible in the vastness of its demand for selflessness. Being open to the desire for the other involves ‘the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerability’ (Levinas, 1998: 48). This ethics is about being ‘for-the-other in vulnerability’ (p. 71) … come what may.

Practically it would seem that Levinas’s ethics is hard to find in work settings, especially those where ‘[a]t worst employees are viewed as numbers and not as people, let alone “faces” in the Levinasian sense’ (ten Bos and Willmott, 2001: 781). In management and leadership it is the comparison between people, rather than each other’s specificity, that is paramount – for example, comparing their perceptions of fairness. Such leadership can be cast as ‘an attempt to capture the elementary experience of self and other in the sphere of managerial control’ (Costea and Introna, 2008: 187) and ‘through this move the “Otherness” of the Other, the exceptional, is neatly bracketed and covered over’ (Introna, 2003: 212). That is not to say, of course, that all discussions of leadership have eschewed issues of ethics and alterity in the way that leadership justice has. This is most pronounced in considerations of ‘servant leadership’ (Greenleaf, 1977/2002). Such leadership derives from the ethical premise that ‘caring for persons, the more and less able caring for each other, is what makes a good society’ (p.17). Resonating with Levinas’s ethics, the moral dimension of servant leadership is said to be operationalized when leaders become other-focused. The servant leadership practices derived from this are: listening and empathizing with followers, devotion to serving the needs of others, commitment to people’s personal growth, and building and maintaining communities at work (Spears, 1998).

Servant leadership brings with it a moral dimension absent in transformation models – with leaders ranging from Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin all said to match the general criteria established to identify charismatic leadership (Graham, 1991). Others, however, have clarified this, suggesting that it is ethics that distinguishes ‘pseudo-transformational leadership’ from ‘truly transformational leadership’ (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999). By this account a central component of a truly transformational leadership is ‘the moral character of the leaders and their concern for self and others’ (p. 182) – their ability to ‘care about the people and situation at stake’ (Lurie, 2004: 10). Proposing that transactional forms of leadership are ‘grounded in a worldview of self-interest’ (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999: 185), it is asserted that authentic transformational leadership is based on relationships where self-interest is secondary to a commitment to ethical standards, focusing on the ‘best in people’ and aligning action with the ‘ultimate benefit and satisfaction’ of others (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999: 189) – all underscored, in almost Levinasian terms, by the ‘necessity of altruism’ (p. 189).

Servant leadership and authentic transformational leadership share the idea that leaders not only will, but can, lead in a way that displays ethical care and respect for each and every other person. Moreover, it is posited that they can do so without at all conflicting with the organizational imperatives with which the leader is charged, or with the different demands that different people might place on the leader. It is assumed that a harmonious balance can be reached so as ‘to achieve the common good of the organization, while at the same time meeting the needs and safeguarding the rights of the various stakeholders’ (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999: 200). What this does not adequately account for, however, is the complex and politically charged relationship in which leaders are embroiled in practice. Unlike these leadership theories, however, Levinas does not simply assume that adopting an ethical position of being ‘for-the-other’ can be used easily to achieve harmonious communal relations. Instead, his work attends directly to the complexities of what might actually be involved when such an ethics is brought to bear on the social and political realities of the world – here, the world of organizations.

Practical justice

As outlined above, for Levinas the meaning of ethics originates in the awe inspired in the face-to-face relation between two people where the other who one faces is infinitely different from oneself and ignites one’s responsibility. Practically speaking, however, the social and organizational world is not characterized by such dyadic relationships – as if the servant leader had only one master rather than a range of masters whose demands might conflict. Taken alone, Levinas’s ethics is not ‘practical’ in relating to leadership practice understood as an in situ accomplishment located in the everyday complexity of relations with other people at work (Larson and Lundholm, 2010). Indeed Levinas’s thinking, as presented so far, is somewhat lofty in its appreciation of the ethical. In this vein, Levinas has been characterized as a ‘utopian idealist’ (Manderson, 2007: 80) and a ‘moral perfectionist’ in that he ‘describes the commitment we ought to have in ways that seem impossibly demanding’ (Putnam, 2002: 36).

The demands of Levinas’s ethics can be understood in terms of the relationship between his philosophy and his Judaism. It has been suggested that there is an analogue between Levinas’s work and a call for ‘translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek discourse’ (Morgan, 2007: 389) – the latter being understood as ‘the language of European and Western civilization’ (p. 388). In this sense, Levinas is ‘both drawing on Jewish sources and themes’ and ‘universalizing Judaism’ (Putnam, 2002: 46). This process is not one that seeks to convert gentiles to Jews even though Levinas’s ‘intended audience […] is not just Jews but humanity as a whole’ (p. 47). What Levinas does is to expand the ‘duty of hospitality’ central to Jewish thought so as to open up the meaning of humanity in general (Derrida, 1999). With this ‘opening up’, Levinas exceeds accusations of piousness and the abstract articulation of a moral perfectionist position in that his philosophy is very much rooted in the vexing moral problems of the present. Taken this way, the importance of Levinas’s thinking is its pragmatism as it concerns the practical importance of ‘service to others’ (Shaw, 2008: xxi). It is a consideration of this that animates Levinas’s work – a matter that achieves a more ‘practical’ and less ‘perfectionist’ standpoint in his account of justice. This is practical, not in the sense of offering normative advice on how to be just, but rather in elaborating the meaning of justice in social contexts. What Levinas’s work achieves, as explored next, is to move from ethics so as to consider ‘justice necessary as a practical matter’ (Manderson, 2007: 73).

Leadership is practised in the ‘messy world of organizations’ – an ambiguous, dynamic, and situational context (Denis et al., 2010). Part of this messiness involves the vast range of different people and interests brought to bear on the leader’s day-to-day activities. So contextualized, if a leader were to abide by an ethics concerned with service to other people (Greenleaf, 1997/2002), this ethics of generosity to a particular other person would always conflict with the potential to be generous to all of the other others. The assumption that this might be achieved harmoniously (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999) is far from practical because one cannot offer the full potential of one’s generosity to all; in a social, community or organizational setting generosity is always divided. Levinas (1998) explains the meaning of such sociality for ethics in relation to what he refers to as the ‘third party’. With this term he is interested in what happens to the ethics of the face-to-face when there are more than two people involved. This enables Levinas to move from a philosophical exploration of the meaning of ethics to a position that is much more relevant to the understanding of ethics and justice in relation to the everyday practice of leadership and organizations.

For Levinas, the third party interrupts the face-to-face relationship between two, and it is with this interruption that ‘justice begins’ (Levinas, 1998: 150). The reason this is the beginning of justice is that the presence of a third party diverts attention from the face-to-face relation where one is engulfed by the one other, to the face of an ‘other other’ as well as bringing into question the relationship between those two others. One’s attention and resources must now be divided and therefore full devotion and responsibility inspired by the face of the one other is no longer possible – ethics, while still being meaningful, is now subject to inevitable compromise. It is with this compromise that rationality becomes necessary. When one is responsible for more than one other person, as leaders are, there is some need to share and to divide – one’s care and attention must be directed at many people at the same time. This is indeed the conundrum of an ethically informed justice – it is a pre-rational desire for the other that instigates justice, but justice itself calls for a certain practical rationality that works out how to divide things between all of the others. The experience of justice is then not a matter of being fair and equal, but of grappling with the ethical dilemmas of how to proceed when the needs of all can never be met.

The conceptions of leadership justice reviewed earlier are aware of the calculative nature of justice given their focus on the distribution of resources, the application of procedures and the sharing of information fairly across all members of the organization. What differs is that, while theories of leadership justice assume that such perceptions of fairness can be achieved and can be righteously aligned with organizational interests, with Levinas this form of division becomes the incessant question (rather than the answer) of justice. What also differs is that, while leadership justice is enacted as a formal rationality, for Levinas justice is always that through which ethics is imperfectly operationalized in the social world. What arises practically is the need to negotiate the contradictions between ethical relations with the other and rational distribution. It is this that drives the relentless dilemmas that characterize the pursuit of justice. This is not an easy position to be in as far as Levinas’s ethics is concerned because division requires comparison between people – the very comparison that defies what Levinas means by ethics. Put starkly, the implication is that ‘ethical leadership is unattainable’ (Knights and O’Leary, 2006: 126). This portends that in practice there is no room for self-righteousness – only for an ongoing questioning of the self in relation to the others to whom one is responsible. Just leadership is no longer about trying to ensure that followers perceive one’s actions as fair in order to improve one’s own effectiveness – it is about navigating the ethical quandaries and dilemmas that leading other people, and being responsible for them, inevitably raise. This justice, while it might result in a particular set of values on which a leader makes decisions, does not determine the nature of those values. Nor does it result in a normative prescription for how leaders should behave in particular situations. Instead, it attests to the radical particularity of each such situation and the call to attend to the ethical specificities that this engenders. That is not to suggest that substantive rationality and ultimate values (see Weber, 1948/1991) are of no importance, but that there is something prior to such modes of rationality – responsibility to the other is the foundation of rationality. Just leadership, by this account, relies on remembering the ethical basis of rationality and of justice rather than justifying action only in a value-rational way.

The everyday practice of leadership justice can now be understood in terms of the need to make decisions when faced with multiple and conflicting demands from other people, all of which can be conceived of as important. For leaders this might mean, for example, conflicting demands from different followers, or conflicting demands between what is good for employees and what is good for the organization. Dealing with such conflicts means, for leaders, the requirement to compare all of the demands, and decide which ones to try to serve, which to neglect or how to compromise between them. Of course, such decisions might be made pragmatically or instrumentally in relation to what is best for the leader him or herself, but if justice is to be considered then the decision must be based on some notion of what is the fairest decision even though that decision will not serve everyone. This is the practical challenge of just leadership – a challenge that is eschewed by leadership theory in its obsession with self-effectiveness through measuring perceptions of fairness.

Justice, for Levinas, entails ‘a comparison of what is in principle incomparable’ (Levinas, 2006) – a comparison between at least two others who are radically different. On account of this, the practice of leadership justice is always already in a heated ethical conundrum – ethics demands justice to be applied in organizations, but justice, because it requires compromise between people, can never live up to the absoluteness of the ethical demands that invoked it. The question for leadership practice is: how might these impossible dilemmas be resolved or responded to? One way to address this is through the institution codes, norms or policies designed to guide judgement and decision making (Brown et al., 2010; see Helin and Sandström, 2010). Consistency of policy is one way that leaders can try to ensure justice – at least distributive and procedural justice. Another would be to establish the ‘legitimate values’ on which leaders base their actions (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999) – for example honesty, integrity, appreciation of others, love, and equality (Russell, 2001). The inevitable yet impossible condition that Levinas’s ethics invokes, however, is that by offering equal treatment for all by virtue or by law (even if that were possible) the absolutely singular ethical relationship of the face-to-face is irrevocably yet unavoidably broken.

What does this mean, then, for leadership and justice? As has been argued, a concern for justice highlights the unavoidable politics that the leadership function is always located in. In Weberian terms, this approximates the conflict between the public and the private spheres. The key difference, however, is that while Weber privileges the masculine formal rationality of the public (Bologh, 1990), Levinas not only privileges what Weber regards as private/feminine but goes beyond this to explain how what might be conceived of as individual ‘ultimate values’ actually arise from relationships with others. With Levinas, politics is always personal and the Weberian divisions do not hold, at least insofar as ethics and justice are concerned. Justice is about how this personal/political (viz., feminine/masculine) relation is managed. The disruption caused by the third party means that one must now respond to more than one other – to make a choice between them and to decide which one to put first. This portends an ongoing oscillation between ethics and politics (Simmons, 1999), where leaders are caught up in contexts where they might try at once to be responsible to one other (say an employee) only to find that they face demands from other others (say another employee, a boss or a customer) and that these demands are not commensurable. Dealing with these competing calls for responsibility is the location where justice defines leadership. Moreover, in this ‘dealing’ there is no guarantee that everyone will perceive that matters are fair.

It is not so much that leaders can declare themselves as being just on the basis of some or other criteria that might be a guarantor of righteousness, nor even on whether followers ‘perceive’ that they have been treated justly. Rather, justice is something that places practical demands on leadership – demands to take responsibility and to decide when no decision is adequate to all. Justice demands that leaders negotiate the inevitable but necessary tensions between ethics and justice, as well as recognize that it is the presence of those tensions that are the sign of ethical self-questioning in organizations and of just leadership (Byers and Rhodes, 2007). Just leadership is an ongoing engagement with the irresolvable anxieties, dilemmas, contradictions and double-binds that occur in the conflict between the ethical demands of all of the others. Such justice must be inspired by an ethical caring for and generosity towards every single unique other person, while at the same time requiring compromise between them.

Conclusions and implications

This article has provided a critique of dominant approaches to leadership justice, arguing that they appropriate justice as a rational means through which to achieve organizational effectiveness. Drawing on a Weberian (1978) approach to rationality and bureaucracy, it was argued that in contemporary management thinking justice is not so much a substantive rationale for action as it is a formal and instrumental one. Turning especially to Bologh’s (1990) critique of Weber, it was further argued that this rationalization of justice belies its masculinization, and as a result human values grounded outside a calculative rationality are sidelined. In seeking to redeem the value of justice in relation to leadership, the ethical theory of Levinas was used to consider the possibilities of a leadership justice that is valued not on account of its formal rationality but on account of its foundation in ethical care for others.

It is from Levinas that we understand individuals not as self-sufficient but rather ‘always embedded in a context of relations that inherently charge the subject with responsibilities corresponding to its existential position’ (Kleinberg-Levin, 2008: 21). For leaders this existential position translates into a concern for other people as connected with the exercise of power and authority and, moreover, the taking of responsibility for that exercise. It is this responsibility – understood as an ethical responsibility – that can only manifest in justice. It is not enough to suggest that justice is a particular variety of leadership behaviour but rather that leadership is the practice of justice. This statement registers that the function of the leader as one with responsibility to many others is always about working through justified means by which to attend to the multiple and potentially conflicting demands that are placed by them on her/him.

The implications of this argument for leadership justice are significant. Such implications, however, are not of a formal or procedurally prescriptive nature – to render them so would fall into the trap of rational calculation of which Bologh (1990) has warned us. As she explains:

Institutionalization means that formal procedures are established that determine the mode of action to follow in a given case. If we are to avoid absolutization, the aim must be to transform impersonal institutions by infusing them with the rationality of love, compassion and aesthetic pleasure; to counterbalance the one-sided concern with the quantitative, measurable outcomes and ‘objective’ impersonal considerations with a concern for qualitative, singular effects and ‘subjective’ personalized considerations. (Bologh, 1990: 141)

Indeed, following Levinas, justice itself must be grounded in such singularity. What this means is that true justice must arise from ethics – from the face-to-face relation with the other person to whom one is responsible, who is radically different from me, and whose very presence demands generosity, hospitality and charity. In contrast, justice, as rational, ‘has a tendency to universalize, unify, and totalize in a way that can forget, neglect or suppress the plurality of voices that express, each one in its own way, the singularity of the other’ (Kleinberg-Levin: 2008: 48). And so justice always violates ethics because it involves a comparison of the ethically incomparable. The implication for leadership is that justice is not about ensuring that people report that they are treated fairly, but is about engaging in and taking responsibility for the heated ethical dilemmas entailed in trying to be just. This justice is not a state of being that can be achieved in the cold comfort of self-righteousness, but is a motivating force that calls into question and troubles the practice of leadership in all its dimensions.

The quality of just leadership lies primarily in the character of how leaders, individually and collectively, exercise their power in relation to other people. Any leadership practice that has a material effect on other people is open to deliberation in terms of ethics and justice. Following Levinas, with these deliberations leaders must concern themselves with their relations with all the others their actions affect, while at the same time being prepared to answer to each other person – these are the boundaries of leadership justice. This is what Introna (2007) calls ‘singular justice’, in that it must be delivered face-to-face; any principles, laws or generalizations about justice are thus applied not to everyone, but individually in relation to each person, at least in the sense that each person receives them separately.

As discussed earlier, the dominant understanding of leadership justice is problematically aligned with the Weberian distinction between formal and substantive rationality – a forced distinction between reason and conscience (Brubaker, 1984) and masculine and feminine (Bologh, 1990). In this case justice becomes associated with masculine reason and rationality – a rational calculus whereby justice is at the service of organizational effectiveness such that an abstracted notion of the organization becomes the primary ‘other’ to whom a leader is thought to have ethical responsibility. In contrast, the consideration of Levinas (as translated into Weberian terms) put forward here has suggested that an ethically informed leadership justice is one where formal rationality must seek its primary justification in the concern for actual other people. This justification is not reflective, however, of what Weber (1978) refers to as ‘ultimate values’ but rather emerges from ethics understood in the Levinasian sense as being from and for the other – from alterity. The distinction is that while substantive rationality reflects the ethical norms that provide the standards against which ‘empirical events may be selected, measured and judged’ (Kalberg, 1980: 1155), ethics precedes the establishment or adoption of such norms, located as it is in a pre-rational exposure and openness to the other. What is received from Levinas is the idea that it is not rationality but non-rationalizable alterity that is the font of ethics. It is this non-rationalizability that gives justice the possibility of being ethical, or more precisely of being developed in response to ethics. It is the embrace of this non-rational concern for others that characterizes just leadership.

The dominant conception of leadership justice is one where what is ostensibly done in the name of the other barely conceals its inherent placing of commercial, corporate and/or organizational rationality above considerations of the arduous dilemmas that arise from having potentially conflicting responsibilities to ‘all the others’ (Levinas, 1998: 159). While the practice of leadership is characterized by multiple and complex ethical challenges, contemporary theories of leadership justice have disengaged from such complexity by seeking to conceive of justice as a matter of masculine formal rationality based on creating a perception of fairness for the purpose of organizational effectiveness. Such theory participates in the tendency to regard leaders as archetypal figures free from the contradictions of context and that is expressive of a desire to control organizational destiny (Czarniawska-Joerges and Wolff, 2001). While such a conception of leadership may be organizationally seductive (Calas and Smircich, 2001), it is naive to the experience of ethics. The rational underpinnings of leadership justice theory appear like a bizarre male fantasy out of touch with the experiential complexity of the work of leadership and the varied contextual predicaments that leaders will construct and find themselves constructed in at different points in time (Fairhurst, 2009). Indeed, leadership justice theory speaks more to the desires for a leadership subsumed in instrumental organizational rationality than it does to the multiple possible realities of ‘doing leadership’ (Sveninggson and Larsson, 2006). This form of idealized justice denies ethics by reducing justice to the application of an instrumental formula that has as its goal not justice, but organizational effectiveness. As has been shown, this dominant approach to organizational justice, as it is pre-occupied with how leaders can influence the perceptions of justice amongst their followers, is both naive and self-serving: naive in that it does not account for the complex ethical dilemmas faced by leaders who allow themselves to be affected by the ethical demands of others; self-serving in that it assumes that the purpose of just leadership is to promote leadership and organizational effectiveness – i.e. justice is just a means to a organizationally sanctioned end.

In seeking to develop an alternative way of conceiving of organizational justice, the ethical philosophy of Levinas asks us to turn away from the embedded assumptions that leaders seek justice for their own and their organization’s effectiveness – indeed, these are assumptions that render justice as merely another form of self-interest. What we are offered instead is the opening up of a space for a more affirmative, experientially contingent and other-focused notion of leadership justice – one based on generosity and hospitality while at the same time being mired in the political practicalities of organizational life. This just leader is less interested in his/ her own instrumental effectiveness than in grappling with his/ her conflicting relationships and responsibilities. This ‘grappling’ is central to the quality and condition of just leadership such that what it might mean to be effective is put into question by the demand to do justice to all other people to which one owes responsibility. There is no end to the quest for justice – indeed, it is this quest which is a condition of leadership, as well as one of its most indefatigable challenges.