Gibbs model of reflection analysis

Article Review Using Gibbs' Reflective Cycle

Article Review Using Gibb’s Reflective Cycle

Requirements APA STYLE

1. Brief Introduction to Gibbs’ Cycle of reflection, How it is used to review articles

2. Abstract

3. Introduction

4. Body( According to rules of Gibbs cycle) (Give personal examples and references)

a) Description

b) Feelings

c) Evaluation

d) Analysis

e) Conclusion

f) Action Plan

5. Critically analyze the article using Elements of Thoughts i.e

The purpose should be clear, Clarity is the main motive

Accuracy: Information provided should be accurate

Depth: Deeply review and criticize the article,

Logic: Entire article should be logically organized

6. Conclusion

7. References at least 8 ( References should be from peer-review articles, textbooks, journals )

8. NOTE: All references MUST HAVE: authors, publication dates, and publishers. “Anonymous” authors and sources without dates or publishers will not be accepted as valid sources and marks will be deducted.

1. Read the posted article called “Business Leadership: Three Levels of Ethical Analysis” and write an article review discussing your understanding of the model presented and how it relates to leadership.

2. Write the article as if you are the author; everywhere introduce yourself as the author eg.

The author believes…

The author criticizes….. etc

3. Use the Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle to discuss concepts in the article and relate them to how you personally deal with these types of situations.

4. Provide an example(s) to substantiate and analyze concepts from the Three Levels of Ethical Analysis paper.

5. Discuss how your actions relate to the three levels in the paper.

Business Leadership: Three Levels

of Ethical Analysis Daniel E. Palmer

ABSTRACT. Research on the normative aspect of

leadership is still a relatively new enterprise within the

mainstream of leadership studies. In the past, most aca-

demic inquiry into leadership was grounded in a social

scientific paradigm that largely ignored the ethical sub-

stance of leadership. However, perhaps because of a

number of public and infamous cases of failure in business

leadership, in recent years there has been renewed interest

in the ethical side of leadership in business. This paper

argues that ethical issues of leadership actually arise at

number of different levels, and that it is important to

distinguish between various diverse kinds of ethical issues

that arise in the study of leadership. The three levels

identified are the level of the individual morality of

leaders, the level of the means of their leadership, and the

level of the leadership mission itself. We argue that only

by fully understanding all of the different levels of ethical

analysis pertinent to business leadership, and the distinc-

tive kind of issues that arise at each level, can we fully

integrate normative studies of leadership into the field of

leadership studies. As such, this paper offers a model that

incorporates three different levels of ethical analysis that

can be used to study normative issues in leadership

studies. Such a model can be used to better understand

and integrate ethical issues into research, teaching, and

training in leadership.

KEY WORDS: authenticity, leadership studies, moral

character, respect, responsibility, telos, virtue theory

Leadership studies is a well-established field of

business research, and much effort has been put into

delineating the nature and characteristics of leader-

ship in the business world (see, Antonakis et al.,

2004; and Weber, 1997). For most of the history of

leadership studies, researchers focused primarily

upon empirical questions concerning the nature of

leadership: questions concerning the characteristics

possessed by successful leaders or various models of

leadership style (Antonakis et al., 2004). The aim of

such research could be summarized in terms of the

attempt to achieve a better understanding of what

makes for effective leadership. However, as Joanne

Ciulla points out, much less attention was paid in the

literature to ‘‘the ethics of how they lead or the

moral value of their achievements’’ (Ciulla, 2003,

p. vi). Perhaps precisely because leadership studies in

the twentieth century were largely grounded in the

social scientific paradigm (Ciulla, 2002, p. 339), the

normative underpinnings of leadership went largely

unexplored. This is not to say that various moral

qualities of leaders were not commonly noted or

even advocated for, but that when such normative

considerations were raised, they were seen as largely

incidental to the study of leadership itself. However,

in recent years there has been a growing recognition

that there are a number of reasons for believing that

the normative side of leadership must be more fully

incorporated into the mainstream of leadership

studies.

One reason for this renewed interest of the ethical

side of leadership studies is that, at the practical level,

the spectacular business failures involved in well-

known cases such as Enron, WorldCom, Firestone,

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 15th

International Symposium on Ethics, Business, and Society at

the IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barce-

lona, Spain.

Daniel E. Palmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of

Philosophy at Kent State University, Trumbull Campus.

His research focuses mainly upon issues of ethical theory and

applied ethics, particularly business and professional ethics.

He is the co-editor of Stakeholder Theory: Essential Readings

in Ethical Leadership and Management (Prometheus, 2008)

and has published articles in such journals as Business Ethics

Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, and The Journal of

Value Inquiry.

Journal of Business Ethics (2009) 88:525–536 � Springer 2009 DOI 10.1007/s10551-009-0117-x

and more recently in the sub-prime mortgage

banking industry, all involved failures of leadership.

Those who watched the stories of these cases unfold

recognized the strong role that executive leaders

played in the events that led to these business crises

(see, for example, Sison, 2003). Further, because of

the serious impact the events in these cases had upon

employees, customers, investors, and the community

at large, witnesses to them rightly recognized that

their proper analysis must involve a moral compo-

nent. In short, many people correctly recognized

that the failures of leadership involved were not

merely pragmatic failures to achieve business goals,

though they were in the end no doubt that too, but

ethical failures as well. Likewise, as Jay Conger

points out, as executive compensations have sky-

rocketed in recent years, far beyond comparative

growth in the salaries of other employees, a greater

spotlight has been put upon the value of these

executives’ leadership (2005). Are the ever growing

compensation packages justified by the leadership

that those who receive them provide? Are such

highly paid leaders really acting in the best interest of

the corporations that they lead, or are they merely

promoting their own self-interest? Questions such as

these have inevitably led to more concern for the

ethical foundations of leadership.

In conjunction with such practical concerns that

focused attention on the ethics of leadership in the

public’s eye, the limitations of the purely social sci-

entific paradigm of studying leadership were also

being challenged at the conceptual level. Again,

Joanne Ciulla, who has been at the forefront of the

recent move toward the normative analysis of lead-

ership studies, forcefully argues that there is an

essential ambiguity in the notion of good leadership

that is the focus of leadership studies (2004, p. 308).

The notion of good leadership can have both a

purely pragmatic sense and a normative sense. In the

first sense, good leadership simply means instru-

mentally effective leadership, while in the second

sense the meaning of good leadership implies ethi-

cally responsible leadership. Unfortunately, the social

scientific paradigm common in leadership studies

typically adopted the first notion without clarifying

its connection to the second. For this reason, Ciulla

and others involved in the normative turn in lead-

ership studies argue that we need to supplement

the social scientific studies of leadership with a

normative account of leadership that seeks to clarify

the ethical sense of good leadership as well as its

connection to the more pragmatically grounded

conception of good leadership.

While Ciulla and others have done much to clarify

such questions about the normative nature of lead-

ership, in this paper my goal is to further advance this

agenda by offering a model for conceptualizing the

role of ethical considerations in leadership studies. My

aim in this regard is twofold. One, I will argue that

ethical issues of leadership actually arise at a number

of different levels, and that it is important that we

distinguish between various kinds of ethical issues that

arise in the study of leadership. In this regard, I will

offer a model that incorporates three different levels of

ethical analysis that can be used to study normative

issues in leadership studies. Such a model can be used

to better understand and integrate ethical issues into

research, teaching, and training in leadership. In

offering such a model though, I will also argue for a

particular view of the nature of good leadership in

business. In this regard, I will argue that a robust

account of good leadership will make it clear as

to why normative considerations are intrinsic to

understanding the nature of business leadership itself.

The essential nature of leadership

Before delving into a consideration of the ethics of

leadership, something must first be said about the

nature of leadership itself. This task is a bit more

difficult than it might appear at first, for despite the

decades of research on leadership there still remains

a number of divergent approaches to identifying the

nature of leadership. In a wide-ranging survey of

the history of the literature on leadership studies,

Joseph Rost (1991) found hundreds of different

definitions of leadership. Indeed, Bernard Bass notes

that ‘‘there are almost as many different definitions

of leadership as there are persons who have

attempted to define the concept’’ (2007, p. 16). To

further complicate matters, leadership is often

defined contextually, as for instance, in contrast to

management (Kotter, 2007). While everyone seems

to be able to intuitively recognize instances of

leadership, arriving at a precise definition of lead-

ership for the purposes of scholarly inquiry has not

proven to be an easy task.

526 Daniel E. Palmer

Indeed, when looking at the vast array of defi-

nitions of leadership that have been provided, one

might be led to conclude ‘‘the meaning of leadership

may depend on the kind of institution in which

it is found’’ (Bass, 2007, p. 16). However, without

claiming to be able to provide a complete or com-

prehensive definition of leadership, I nonetheless do

think that when looking at the literature concerning

its definition, we can arrive at what I will call a core

concept of leadership. This core notion of leader-

ship, I would argue, is essential to any complete

notion of the concept, and can be seen as an element

of any of the various definitions previously pro-

posed. My own view is that the various competing

definitions of leadership are arrived at by building on

the core notion of leadership in different ways, or

by accenting the elements of the core notion in

different manners or in relation to different contexts.

Thus, while I will not argue for a complete defini-

tion of leadership in this paper, I will maintain that

any plausible notion of leadership will include the

core element discussed here. In this view, leadership,

at its core, essentially involves influencing others to

act in light of a vision of how best to achieve a

shared mission.1

This core notion properly gets out two aspects

essential to the idea of leadership: that leadership

involves motivating others to act and to do so in

light of some common aim. There are, of course,

lots of different ways in which people can be

influenced to act: ranging from threats of force to

appeals to the common good, but all leadership seeks

to move others to act. However, the attempt to

move others to action, while a necessary element of

leadership, is by no means sufficient for explaining

what leadership involves. For what is also distinctive

about leadership is that it seeks to move others to

action in light of some purpose, and some purpose

that is offered not merely as the purpose of the leader

herself, but as a purpose for those who are moved to

act (see, for instance, Antonakis et al., 2004;

Greenleaf, 2003; Kotter, 2007; and Weber, 1997). In

this regard, Jack Weber rightly notes that ‘‘increas-

ingly the notion of leadership is most commonly

associated with the notion of vision’’ (1997, p. 364).

There are two further points concerning the core

definition of leadership offered here that are worth

noting. First, it makes it clear why leadership is

better thought of as a function than as a specific role,

a point now widely recognized in the literature on

business leadership (Kotter, 2007). Persons take on

a leadership function whenever they take on the

responsibility for moving others to act in light of a

common mission, and while some persons, such as

CEOs and other high level executives, may exer-

cise that function more often than others because

of their corporate roles, nearly any position within

a corporation, from mid-level manager to sales

clerk, will offer the opportunity for leadership at

some point as well. The recent trend toward

inculcating leadership skills among all levels of

employment is in this regard well founded. Busi-

nesses continue to adopt new modes of organiza-

tion in the light of rapidly developing technologies,

globalization, and new workplace models, and the

leadership function is now more dispersed than

under older hierarchical organizational models

(Weber, 1997).

The core notion of leadership also allows us to see

the difference between the managerial and the lead-

ership function often made use of in the literature of

leadership studies (Kotter, 2007). The managerial

function involves such things as implementing pro-

cesses, allocating resources, monitoring results, and

overseeing day-to-day operations, while the leader-

ship function involves envisioning new directions,

generating strategic change, and inspiring people to

accept and act upon a corporate mission. We should

not conclude from this that the roles of manager and

leader are necessarily different, or that there are two

kinds of individuals, leaders and managers. The same

role can involve both functions at varying times and

to varying degrees, and the same individual may well

exercise both functions in different contexts (Kotter,

2007). Nonetheless, there is an important difference

between the managerial function and the leader-

ship function; a difference that renders the ethical

responsibilities of the leadership function signifi-

cantly different from that of the managerial function.

The management function is one of implementa-

tion, and does not involve the visionary aspect

inherent in the leadership function.

Having outlined what I take to be the core ele-

ment of leadership itself, I would also stress here that

I will largely be concerned with the notion of busi-

ness leadership in this paper. This is important to bear

in mind since, as was noted earlier, the context of

leadership can determine the nature of the particular

Business Leadership 527

kind of leadership. Though all forms of leadership

will involve the core notion of leadership, there will

be differences in the particular forms that leadership

takes in different organizational or social contexts;

military leadership, educational, or political leader-

ship thus should not be expected to function exactly

the same as business leadership. In part, this is because

these domains involve different missions, and the

leadership function in business will be uniquely

guided by a business mission. Thus, we cannot

understand business leadership without understand-

ing the underlying goods of business, a point I will

return to later. I would also note here that we should

not confuse the motivation of particular leaders with

their leadership vision itself. The latter is an ideal for

which the efforts of both the leader and those who

follow him or her are to be directed. In this sense, it is

for the business itself that the business leader leads,

not merely for himself or herself, or for personal gain.

This is not to say that (s)he might be largely moti-

vated by personal gain to lead, as presumably most

people who enter the world of business do so at least

partly out of such motivation. But it is to say that

we should not confuse the personal motivation of

leaders, whatever they might be, with the aim of

their leadership, for the latter is clearly grounded

in something independent of their personal moti-

vations.

In a similar regard, we should also note that what

distinguishes leadership in business from leadership

in other domains such as education, politics, or the

military is not a distinction, as has sometimes been

implied, between the characteristics or motivations

of the leaders themselves, as, again, the personal

motivations for taking on leadership roles in any

domain can vary from person to person. Rather, the

difference between the leadership function in dif-

ferent areas depends upon what Aristotle would call

the telos, or purpose, of those realms of activity.

According to Aristotle, every activity has its own

end or purpose – the good or the reason for which

that activity is done (Aristotle, 1999). The telos of

an activity refers to this reason or good for which an

activity aims. The difference in the nature of lead-

ership in different fields will then depend in part

upon the nature of those fields themselves and the

kinds of ends that they seek to secure: that is, from

the differences of telos between different arenas of

activity.

Three levels of ethical analysis in leadership

studies

Having outlined the basic nature of the leadership

function in business, we can now turn to an exam-

ination of the ethics of leadership. As noted earlier,

while there has been a growing interest in ethical

issues involved in leadership, the conceptual foun-

dations for understanding these issues is still in need

of clarification. Here, I will show that there are

actually three different levels of analysis concerning

ethical issues in leadership, and that it is important to

recognize each distinctive area as well as the unique

issues that are raised in each. I will also argue that it is

at the third level of analysis that the most significant

questions concerning the ethics of leadership arise in

business, and that this level of analysis needs more

attention than it has so far garnered. Along the way, I

also hope to provide some further clarification on

the various ways in which efficiency and ethics are

related in good business leadership.

The first level of analysis: ethical leadership

as the ethics of leaders

One way of conceiving the ethical requirements of

leadership is to focus upon the ethical behavior of

leaders qua individuals. Indeed, when ethical com-

ponents of leadership were mentioned in most of the

business leadership literature in the past, it was pri-

marily in terms of this level of analysis. Leaders, it

was claimed, should exhibit a personal morality that

served as a model for the ethical behavior of those

under them. Not surprisingly, ethical accounts of

leadership that operate at this level of analysis tend to

result in encouragement for leaders to adopt ethically

sound behaviors, in both their personal and their

professional lives. However, too often they offered

little more than such encouragement. In this regard,

Ciulla argues that such accounts of the ethics of

leadership often treated ‘‘ethics as an exhortation

rather than an in-depth exploration of the subject’’

(2004, p. 305).

Of course, it is no doubt true that it would be

desirable to have leaders who generally exhibit

ethical behavior in their personal and professional

lives, and thus that the ethics of leadership should

include a general account of both morally right

528 Daniel E. Palmer

action and the moral virtues. As John Gardner puts it

in his book On Leadership, ‘‘we should hope that our

leaders will keep alive values that are not so easy to

embed in laws – our caring for others, about honor

and integrity, about tolerance and mutual respect,

and about human fulfillment within a framework

of values’’ (1990, p. 77, as cited in Ciulla, 2004,

p. 305). We all desire that those who would lead us

have a basic commitment to morality. As social

contract theorists have long argued, we are all gen-

erally better off to the extent the persons adopt the

basic principles of morality. Further, it is also prob-

ably true that since the leadership role brings both

greater responsibility for others and interaction with

a larger number of persons, the leaders will have

greater opportunity to exercise their personal moral

characteristics. Thus, we have even more reason for

desiring that leaders display a personal concern for

morality.

However, aside from a general interest in wanting

leaders to be ethical persons, there are two inter-

esting arguments that have recently been made for

seriously considering the personal moral character-

istics of leaders as essential to the nature of our

understanding of leadership. The first sort of argu-

ment, made by Norman Bowie, suggests that there is

a close connection between the personal moral lives

of business leaders and their moral behavior as

business leaders (2005, p. 144). Bowie, for instance,

uses examples of the Haft family, Martha Stewert,

Al Dunlap, Dennis Kozlowski, and others to suggest

that leaders who lack a commitment to ethical

behavior in their personal lives will also be prone to

unethical behavior in their leadership roles. While

Bowie admits that these anecdotal case studies need

to be supported by further empirical ‘hard data,’ he

nonetheless raises a suggestive point about why the

personal morality of leaders might be of significance

to an understanding of the goodness of their lead-

ership as well (2005, p. 158). If Bowie is correct, it

might be true that the distinction between the pri-

vate and the public realm may be more fluid than is

sometimes assumed.

A second consideration is artfully raised by Alejo

Sison in The Moral Capital of Leaders. Sison’s exam-

ination of numerous cases of organizational break-

down within the world of business illustrates the

close connection between corporate downfall and

leadership failure (2003). More importantly though,

Sison demonstrates that such leadership failure stems

in part from a moral failure of leadership. Here,

Sison develops the intriguing notion of moral capital

to describe the resources that human virtue repre-

sents within business enterprises. Sison argues that

moral capital can be seen as crucial to the long-term

success of businesses, and that ‘‘without moral cap-

ital, all other forms of capital could easily turn from

the source of a firm’s advantage to the cause of its

downfall’’ (2003, p. 42). With the notion of moral

capital, he demonstrates how personal virtue trans-

lates into business virtue, and thus is not merely a

personal matter.

Arguments such as Bowie’s and Sison’s go beyond

mere exhortations to ethical behavior on the part of

business leaders and provide a better understanding

of why the morality of leaders matters within busi-

ness enterprise.2 As important as the first level of

analysis may be though, I do not believe it can

provide an exhaustive account of the ethics of

leadership. For instance, though Bowie offers com-

pelling arguments for thinking that there is often a

contingent relationship between personal morality

and good leadership in some business contexts, I do

not believe that such a connection is necessary.

When we consider the vast ways and diverse con-

texts in which the leadership function can occur, it is

not clear why personal morality and good leadership

need always go hand in hand. Bowie even makes this

case in struggling to articulate the relationship

between Bill Clinton’s presidential leadership, which

Bowie himself admires greatly, and Clinton’s clearly

morally problematic personal life (2005, p. 151).