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Identity Talk of Aspirational Ethical Leaders

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Abstract

This study investigates how business leaders dynamically narrate their aspirational ethical leadership identities. In doing so, it furthers understanding of ethical leadership as a process situated in time and place. The analysis focuses on the discursive strategies used to narrate identity and ethics by ethnic Chinese business leaders in Indonesia after their conversion to Pentecostal–charismatic Christianity. By exploring the use of metaphor, our study shows how these business leaders discursively deconstruct their ‘old’ identities and construct their ‘new’ aspirational identities as ethical leaders. This leads to the following contributions. First, we show that ethical leadership is constructed in identity talk as the business leaders actively narrate aspirational identities. Second, the identity narratives of the business leaders suggest that ethical leadership is a context-bound and situated claim vis-à-vis unethical practice. Third, we propose a conceptual template, identifying processes of realisation and inspiration followed by significant shifts in understanding, for the study of aspirational ethical leadership.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the insightful comments of the three anonymous reviewers and of the special issue editors (Dawn Eubanks, Andrew Brown and Sierk Ybema), which have substantially sharpened the arguments developed in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

    Juliette Koning & Jeff Waistell

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  1. Juliette Koning
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  2. Jeff Waistell
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Correspondence to Juliette Koning.

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Koning, J., Waistell, J. Identity Talk of Aspirational Ethical Leaders. J Bus Ethics 107, 65–77 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1297-3

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