Exploring caring leadership through a feminist ethic of care: the case of a sporty CEO

Johansson, J and Edwards, M ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5190-7073, 2021. Exploring caring leadership through a feminist ethic of care: the case of a sporty CEO. Leadership. ISSN 1742-7150

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Abstract

This work critiques the normative construction of ethical leadership and contributes to understanding the ethics of care in leadership from a lifestyle and embodied perspective. Drawing on feminist notions of ethics of care, we question the ethicality of the practices of a sporty and health-oriented leader who claims to transform his attempts at self-care into care for others through role-modelling lifestyle behaviours. We explore inherent moral dilemmas in connecting a seemingly creative self-care project with well-intentioned practices of caring for others. We highlight the need to question persistent masculine rationalisations in ethical leadership, and to engage in and encourage, organisational and relational interactions that take account of specific employee needs. We argue that the leaders’ claiming to care for others by insisting on particular lifestyle behaviours and role-modelling aesthetic bodily ideals introduce new managerial norms in the organisation. The Instrumental intentions come to hamper an ethical care for the well-being of employees, whilst demonstrating the power of the leader to influence employees both inside and outside the organisation.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Leadership
Creators:	Johansson, J. and Edwards, M.
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Date:	18 February 2021
ISSN:	1742-7150
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1177/1742715020987092 DOI 1399397 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	15 Jan 2021 14:46
Last Modified:	31 May 2021 15:06
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/42047

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