Phronetic Transformational Leadership: Moral Rebel Trust-Creating Unknowing-Admitting Outsiders

Abstract

Outsider executives lacking industry insiders’ tacit know-how, phronesis, and premises of decisions learned and developed on the job and in practitioner communities are common. Phronetic transformational leadership research missed the question of how outsider executives solve the major problem of sharing these subordinates’ exclusive experiential knowledge essential for wise leadership. Research has noted insiders’ trust required for sharing these essential resources but rarely addressed and explained those few incomers who by vulnerable involvement in deliberations with subordinates exposed their knowledge gaps to them, initiating trustful dialogs, and close these gaps. Such admission of ignorance requires psychological safety that most outsiders lacked, but its avoidance prevented the full trust necessary to close knowledge gaps by subordinates’ knowledge sharing. Who and why chose otherwise, practiced trust-creating exposure of their knowledge gaps, shared subordinates’ knowledge, and became wise phronetic transformational leaders? Ethnographies of Israeli inter-kibbutz cooperatives found that these were high-moral humble constructive deviants; moved by servant and self-determination motives consistent with kibbutz communal culture, they exposed their local knowledge gaps by vulnerable involvement in deliberations with subordinates, built trust, shared employees’ experiential knowledge, and wisely transformed inter-kibbutz cooperatives. Suggestions for further study of moral rebel phronetic leaders are offered.