Abstract
The recent financial crisis has prompted questioning of our basic ideas about capitalism and the role of business in society. As scholars are calling for “responsible leadership” to become more of the norm, organizations are being pushed to enact new values, such as “responsibility” and “sustainability,” and pay more attention to the effects of their actions on their stakeholders. The purpose of this study is to open up a line of research in business ethics on the concept of “authenticity” as it can be applied in modern organizational life and more specifically to think through some of the foundational questions about the logic of values. We shall argue that the idea of simply “acting on one’s values” or “being true to oneself” is at best a starting point for thinking about authenticity. We develop the idea of the poetic self as a project of seeking to live authentically. We see being authentic as an ongoing process of conversation that not only starts with perceived values but also involves one’s history, relationships with others, and aspirations. Authenticity entails acting on these values for individuals and organizations and thus also becomes a necessary starting point for ethics. After all, if there is no motivation to justify one’s actions either to oneself or to others, then as Sartre has suggested, morality simply does not come into play. We argue that the idea of responsible leadership can be enriched with this more nuanced idea of the self and authenticity.
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Notes
Some may want to reduce the idea of “corporate values” to some notion of the values of individuals. Hopefully, nothing in our argument turns on particular accounts of the nature of values, and in fact, as pragmatists, we wish to avoid such essentialist theorizing. We explore these issues in our next article entitled, “Values and Poetic Organizations.”
The exception is Jackson (2005) which takes a particularly existential approach to authenticity.
Some recent popular business literature has focused on this interpretation of “authenticity.” Gilmore and Pine II (2007) have focused on “authentic” as opposed to “fake.” George (2003) has written about leaders “starting where you are” by which he means not trying to become someone who has different values. Both of these theories have the ring of validity to them, but both take “being authentic” as non-problematic.
The internalism versus externalism debate is rooted in Plato and Aristotle, and was brought into the foreground by Frankena (1958).
We see no reason to make a distinction between matters of “morality” and matters of “prudence.” Self-regarding values may well also only offer motivational force if one has the desire to realize one’s best interest. And, for the internalist, the extent to which moral values trump prudential values is also a matter of knowledge. We believe that this distinction is better made between values that are “primarily self-regarding” and values that are “primarily other-regarding.” In the real world, most people are driven by a mixture of self-regarding reasons and other-regarding reasons. Even Kant believed that self-regarding reasons had moral content, as he carefully wrote about the “duty to self perfection.” We are indebted here to Professors Norman Bowie and Patricia Werhane.
The Enron values were cleverly called by the acronym “RICE,” standing for “Respect,” “Integrity,” “Communication,” and “Excellence.”
Recently, Evan Simpson (1999) has suggested a middle ground between these two extremes, whereby the connection between moral beliefs and motivation is weakened from one of logical necessity to causal dependency. This analysis seems correct to us, and is in keeping with the pragmatist spirit of our suggestions here. We use “internalism” and “externalism” as illustrative of two kinds of problems with the naïve idea of authenticity as being true to self.
For pragmatists saying that we always have a choice and that we continually makes choices is much like saying as Richard Rorty (1980) does that truth should be understood as a cautionary warning… that we may not have all the evidence for a belief. Choice reminds us that we can be masters of our own fate.
We are not claiming that Freud himself had much optimism for “self development” only that it was an outcome of his original insights in a more positive mind such as Rogers’.
See especially, Kets de Vries (2006, pp. 9–11).
There are many reasons that we may want to reconstruct the public–private distinction for purposes of personal freedom, but we should now be tempted to do so at the cost of a more nuanced version of the self.
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Freeman, R.E., Auster, E.R. Values, Authenticity, and Responsible Leadership. J Bus Ethics 98 (Suppl 1), 15–23 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1022-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1022-7