Colloquium on Levinas, leadership, and ethics

This paper applies Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy to the management practice of leadership. Specifically, it focuses on servant leadership, which is considered the most dyadic other-oriented style. While often viewed altruistically, servant leadership can still be egological if it totalizes followers to a leader’s interests and to organizational ends. This paper conceptualises an enriched version of servant leadership using key ideas taken from Levinas’ understanding of the infinite Other and then describes this style using relevant examples. This novel approach, Servant-Leadership-for-the-Other, offers a theoretical lens by which to enrich existing leadership practices as well as providing a style of leadership better suited for the twenty-first century.

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Experiencing Meaningful Work through Corporate Volunteering: The Other as a Source of Meaning

Hatami,

Glińska-Neweś,

Hermes

2024

Humanist Manag J

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Global social, ecological and economic crises are contributing to the need for meaningfulness in different spheres of life, including work, as an increasing concern to employees. However, the current understanding of meaningfulness is bound by its normativity and thus does not meet the uncertainty present in today’s work. We utilize the Levinasian concept of “the Other” to provide a non-normative conceptualization of meaningfulness in the context of corporate volunteering (CV) and empirically explore work meaningfulness in CV projects in Poland and Finland. We find work meaningfulness to arise from proximity to the Other and the otherness of the Other. Our study contributes to the discussion on meaningful work in the fields of business ethics and management studies through a non-normative reconceptualization of meaningfulness.

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Colloquium on Levinas, leadership, and ethics

Cited by 4 publications

References 13 publications

Servant Leadership as if the Other Really Mattered

Servant Leadership as if the Other Really Mattered

The Management Practice of Servant Leadership: A Levinasian Enrichment

Experiencing Meaningful Work through Corporate Volunteering: The Other as a Source of Meaning

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