Kate Robinson

The book starts by providing the rationale of why it is important to understand the shift to a more values-based approach to leadership and building a virtuous culture. This chapter discusses how and why the mood of organizations within Western cultures during this century has shifted to a values-based culture that encourages values-based leadership. Organizational and environmental factors including ethical scandals are raised which have resulted in this shift and the need for leaders to be more virtuous. With a move to being more values-based/virtuous, this chapter illustrates how values are now an influential element of leadership in decision-making right up to the executive and Board levels.

It is important to understand and acknowledge the problem and road to achieving more ethical thinking and behaviors. To know how organizations and individuals can embody ethical and virtuous thinking, we must identify what has created unethical behaviors and cultures. Getting to the core of the issues, a number of organizations and industries are highlighted exemplifying where questionable and unethical behavior occurred. To understand this behavior, this chapter discusses toxic or rogue behaviors, how they evolved, and the impact they have on organizations. By briefly addressing four main values-based leadership approaches (authentic, transformational, servant, and spiritual), the value of values-based leadership is explained. Although theoretical concepts are discussed here, it is focal in understanding leadership approaches to be able to provide a solution to enactment and embodiment of virtue.

This final chapter of the book addresses the core part of the problem, that is, individual agency and consideration of subjectivity should be the solution to achieving values-based leadership. In drawing from the struggles and challenges identified in the case study (Part II), this chapter discusses practical insights, implications, and applications that leaders within rules and compliance-based organizations should consider. In understanding “the road ahead” in achieving a virtues-based culture underpinned by virtues-based leadership two elements are addressed: 1. the impact of norms-based behaviors, whether they are toxic or virtuous, and 2. how the interpretation of rules can create contradictions and tensions. These elements are expanded in detail to consider how the tensions and contradictions highlighted in the case study can be resolved to support a virtuous organization encouraging values-based leadership. Concluding the book, I discuss the complexity of values-based leadership when there is a need to follow rules. Furthermore, considering how values-based leadership is understood and embodied in a rules-based organization, the practical application of what leaders can learn from the case study is provided.

By using the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) as a research case study, this chapter introduces the concept of the ethical and moral dilemmas faced daily by leaders. It is important to note how these dilemmas can include the social and economic impact of their decision-making to the environmental impact from operations. Vignettes are provided in this chapter that were used to understand how military leaders cope and respond to ethical dilemmas in the most extreme situations. The impact or influence of an individual’s subject positions and the tensions and conflict they create in extreme situations are revealed. Topics include bureaucratic barriers to battlefield decision-making; individual moral and social identities and their impact on subject positions and decision-making; and the tension that is caused by the public gaze of perception and reputation. The disconnect between the executive levels to the lower levels of leadership is revealed and how this incommensurability creates tensions and contradictions.

What influence do historical and contemporary rules, policies, and practices have on an organization’s culture? This chapter discusses how history and traditions can stagnate culture and cultural change. To provide structure to the discussion, the three propositions that evolved from the vignette case study in Chapter 3 are resolved by interviewing the same 42 military officers. This chapter talks about the tensions faced by leaders in rules-based organizations that inhibit their ability to be agentive and values-based by way of interviewing these military officers. It also addresses how adopting values-based leadership is problematic in extreme situations because of the primacy of enforceable rules, and finally how rules can undermine the ability to be values-based. Evidence is provided of the barriers, tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes the leaders face in trying to be values-based.

This book focuses on understanding values-based leadership in rules-based organizations. It assists leaders, whether they are Board Members, CEOs, Executives, or Middle to Lower Management, in understanding how to enact and embody values/virtues-based leadership. Of particular interest to readers are the discussions around primary data collected from participants at three levels of leadership in the military who responded to a vignette and interview. The results of the case study are used in conjunction with current trends or practices that are considered unethical and questionable behavior which undermine trust and integrity in organizations. By using a case study from the military, the highly codified rules-based organization illustrates the tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes that leaders face and provide a teachable moment for leaders in all industries the complexities in achieving virtue eudaimonia. In doing so, the book also illustrates the tension and complexities between an individual’s multiple subject positions, organizational rules and values, and the ability to have agency.

Leaders are faced with ethical and moral dilemmas daily, like those within the military who must span from large-scale combat operations to security cooperation and deterrence. For businesses, these dilemmas can include social and environmental impact such as those in mining; and for governments, the social and economic impact of their decision-making in their response to COVID-19. The move by Western defence forces to align their foundational principles, policies, and “soldier” dispositions with the changing values of the countries they serve are starkly illustrative of challenges faced by all leaders. While admirable, such changes face the apparent contradiction of enhancing individual moral agency within a hierarchical organization that maintain enforceable codes of conduct. Ethical leadership theory provides aspirational goals, but lacks empirically based guidance on how to implement policies that facilitate values-based behavior. Using a discourse theory analysis of a moral dilemma vignette with Royal Australian Air Force personnel, this research identifies important aspects of agency and subject position that must be addressed if such policies are to succeed. These findings show that the potential contradiction can be addressed by acknowledging the contrasting tendency to bureaucratic process by leaders at upper levels, while lower-level leaders address moral issues by incorporating their subjectivity and making a conscious deontological choice between humanity and comrade loyalty.

While an understanding of the knowledge which nurses use in practice is rapidly growing there is still much to be learned from exploring the contribution which related disciplines can offer. Since each discipline has its own way of developing its knowledge base it is important for nurses to grasp the underlying manner in which they tackle their work. This book brings together material about many of these disciplines which is normally scattered amongst a wide range of sources. It is presented in a manner which is both accessible and relevant to nursing practice and education. It will help nurses to identify ways in which the knowledge they acquire through study or experience can be used constructively to develop the service they offer patients. The book offers insight into some of the fundamental changes which are occurring in nursing attitudes and thinking. It will provide stimulating reading and discussion material for students on Project 2000, degree and post-registration courses as well as for practitioners who wish to keep at the forefront of a profession which is undergoing continuing and dramatic change.