Leadership Gender And Ethics

This text provides perspectives on the way in which gender plays a role in leadership dynamics and ethics within organizations. It seeks to offer new theoretical models for thinking about leadership and organizational influence. Most studies of women’s leadership draw on an ethics of care as characteristic of the way women lead, but as such, it tends towards essentialist gender stereotypes and does little to explain the complex systemic variables that influence the functioning of women within organizations. This book moves beyond the canon in exploring alternative paradigms for thinking about leadership and gender in organizations. The authors draw on the literature available in systems thinking, systemic leadership, and gender theory to offer alternative perspectives for thinking about the ways women lead. The book offers invaluable theoretical perspectives and insightful narratives to graduate students and researchers who are interested in women’s leadership, gender and organization. It will be of interest to all women in leadership positions, but specifically to those interested in understanding the systemic nature of leadership and their role within it.

This book has a clear concern to offer a distinctive way of studying leadership so that it might be practiced differently. It is distinctive in focusing on contemporary concerns about gender and ethics. More precisely, it examines the masculinity of leadership and how, through an embodied form of reasoning, it might be challenged or disrupted. A central argument of the book is that masculine leadership elevates rationality in ways that marginalize the body and feelings and often has the effect of sanctioning unethical behavior. In exploring this thesis, Leadership, Gender and Ethics: Embodied Reason in Challenging Masculinities provides an analysis of the comparatively neglected issues of identity/anxiety, power/resistance, diversity/gender, and the body/masculinities surrounding the concept and practice of leadership. It also illustrates the arguments of the book by examining leadership through an empirical examination of academic life, organization change and innovation, and the global financial crisis of 2008. In a postscript, it analyses some examples of masculine leadership in the global pandemic of 2020. This book will be of interest generally to researchers, academics and students in the field of leadership and management and will be of special interest to those who seek to understand the intersections between leadership and gender, ethics and embodied approaches. It will also appeal to those who seek to develop new ways of thinking and theorizing about leadership in terms of identities and insecurities, power and masculinity, ethics and the body. Its insights might not only change studies but also practices of leadership.

Ethical leadership does not simply emerge from a code of conduct, a good school, or a host of good intentions. It is an individual choice, or rather a series of choices that emerges from the complex interaction of personal values with social imperatives. This book explores how and why some people become ethical leaders in morally challenging and complex social environments. In Ethical Leadership, Aidan McQuade provides insight into the concept of human agency – the individual’s choice of a course of action in response to the options posed by that individual’s engagement with the social world. He puts forth a new model of human agency – the "cruciform of agency" – which recognises that the potential range of individual action emerges from the nature of the resonance that social options strike with personal thoughts. Every action adds to the individual’s personal biography in ways that influence subsequent choices by confirming or changing personal values and hopes, hence influencing the way the individual subsequently thinks about the world. In explaining the potential and limits of human agency for ethical leadership, the book establishes a basis for executives, policy makers and academics to conceptualise and develop more robust and realistic approaches for the mitigation of some of the most pressing moral issues facing humanity today. These include the inter-related challenges of modern slavery and global warming, which pose such critical threats to the Earth itself. In this book McQuade not only sets an agenda for action but empowers individual leaders to find the moral courage to better advance human rights and preserve the environment even when such action requires unpopular choices.

Although women now represent over forty percent of the workforce in most countries, organizations have been slow to capitalize on the potential of their women employees. This volume focuses on the business case for change, sources of resistance - including male backlash, denial, inaction and repression - and both organizational and legislative initiatives to support women. Limitations of affirmative action programs and policies are identified. New approaches towards creating a more level playing-field in organizations are proposed. This volume should be of interest to women and men in managerial and professional positions, women and men studying in professional fields such as business, law and government, organizations interested in managerial best practice and academic researchers whose work examines women in management issues.

This book examines the conceptual underpinnings of authentic leadership to discover why so little attention has been paid to gender. The author explores the failure to interrogate the complexities surrounding the concept of authenticity, especially as it relates to the diversity of lived experience.

Gender, Communication, and the Leadership Gap is the sixth volume in the Women and Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice series. This cross-disciplinary series, from the International Leadership Association, enhances leadership knowledge and improves leadership development of women around the world. The purpose of this volume is to highlight connections between the fields of communication and leadership to help address the problem of underrepresentation of women in leadership. Readers will profit from the accessible writing style as they encounter cutting-edge scholarship on gender and leadership. Chapters of note cover microaggressions, authentic leadership, courageous leadership, inclusive leadership, implicit bias, career barriers and levers, impression management, and the visual rhetoric of famous women leaders. Because women in leadership positions occupy a contested landscape, one goal of this collection is to clarify the contradictory communication dynamics that occur in everyday interactions, in national and international contexts, and when leadership is digital. Another goal is to illuminate the complexities of leadership identity, intersectionality, and perceptions that become obstacles on the path to leadership. The renowned thinkers and scholars in this volume hail from both Leadership and Communication disciplines. The book begins with Sally Helgesen and Brenda J. Allen. Helgesen, co-author of The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work, discusses the two-fold challenge women face as they struggle to articulate their visions. Her chapter offers six practices women can use to relieve this struggle. Allen, author of the groundbreaking book, Difference Matters: Communicating Social Identity, discusses the implications of how inclusive leadership matters to women and what it means to think about women as people who embody both dominant and non-dominant social identity categories. She then offers practical communication strategies and an intersectional ethic to the six signature traits of highly inclusive leaders. Each chapter includes practical solutions from a communication and leadership perspective that all readers can employ to advance the work of equality. Some solutions will be of use in organizational contexts, such as leadership development and training initiatives, or tools to change organizational culture. Some solutions will be of use to individuals, such as how to identify and respond productively to micro-aggressions or how to be cautious rather than optimistic about practicing authentic leadership. The writing in this volume also reflects a range of styles, from in-depth scholarship that produces new knowledge to shorter forums that feature interesting ideas worth considering.

PR Women with Influence: Breaking Through the Ethical and Leadership Challengesmakes a unique and timely contribution by exploring how women in public relations navigate through attitudinal, structural and social barriers in advancing their leadership roles. The book is thoroughly grounded in rich empirical evidence gained through two phases of a funded research project conducted in the field. Phase I involves 51 in-depth interviews with current female leaders in public relations and Phase II captures women's perceptions on gender-related barriers in leadership advancement by recruiting a national panel of female public relations professionals. Results presented in this book provide a compelling, current picture of women and leadership in public relations. By emphasizing our discussion on key issues and barriers as related to women in PR and their leadership advancement, the authors call for real actions and change to develop a constructive ecosystem within the organization to embrace leadership for women in PR. Given its sharp topic focus, wealth of empirical data, and the relevance of the topic to today's public relations profession, this book is suitable for different audiences both nationally and globally. Such audiences include but are not limited to public relations scholars, educators and professionals, both leaders and emerging leaders, men and women, young professionals, women of color, and public relations majors. This book is appropriate for senior-level undergraduate and graduate courses in public relations and communication management to facilitate critical thinking, leadership development, and gender-related topic discussion.