Care In Context: Creating Ethical Board Leadership

Boards and their directors have long been in the spotlight for enabling serious ethical collapses (Arjoon, 2005; Garratt, 2003) with personal moral values (Grant and McGhee, 2017) and leadership of directors proposed as solutions (Cikaliuk et al., 2022; Aubé et al., 2021). This research develops a model of contextual board leadership to accommodate the board setting and its particular ethical challenges.

The first two phases of research conducted interviews with over 30 board professionals across a range of small to large public organisations. Phase 3 developed and validated the findings into guidelines. The findings identified the significance of: context, an adaptive process of leadership across directors, values, board ethical competence, extensive politics and power influences, extensive board unethical leadership and calls for different models of governance. Power and privilege were found to affect a director’s perception of the ethical implications of situations. The findings extend existing calls for new theoretical directions in governance, and suggest existing models are failing to incorporate diversity, complexity of perspective and expertise, and nuanced ethical decision-making, resulting in dysfunction. Ethical board leadership was found to operate across both the chair and board directors as a process of influence to achieve effective board decision-making. Leadership as a social and contextual process of influence emerged, with one or more formal and informal ‘adaptive’ leaders, advancing a processual understanding of leadership (Yukl et al, 2019). Care ethics (Gilligan, 1982) emerged as the most relevant ethical orientation for boards; yet, others were also relevant depending on the concrete situation, thus requiring nuanced situational leadership from directors. Further, ethical and unethical leadership in boards could not be separated: with one easily becoming the other unless ethical approaches are taken to group politics and power dynamics. Political behaviours in the form of organisational politics were found to occur extensively, leading to ineffective decision-making if not managed ethically. The research develops guidelines with 7 dimensions and 40 behavioural items to ensure effective decision-making, particularly in public governance and makes practical and theoretical contributions. These guidelines should be relevant for decades ahead of modernising governance as a sector and for other sectors in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world.