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Volume 16, Number 8
August 2010

Leading with character

Mary Crossan’s research focuses on leadership, character, virtues, and ethical decision making

There’s a wonderful scene in the movie “Invictus.” Nelson Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, has decided to throw his support behind the Springboks, the mostly white team associated with the apartheid regime. It’s an act of forgiveness, designed to bring black and white South Africans together. In a packed meeting Mandela asks his friends and advisors, the country’s new ruling power: “Who is with me on this?” As he looks at the faces around the room, the answer is clear: no-one.

Mary Crossan sees this as a defining moment in Mandela’s leadership. “The movie is about strong character issues,” she says. “When you consider the huge challenges Mandela faced, you realize his enormous personal conviction.”

As the former Director of the Leading Cross-Enterprise Research Centre, Crossan has undertaken a number of projects that examine the failure of leadership that led to the recent financial collapse. Working with Ivey professors Gerard Seijts and Jeffrey Gandz and doctoral student Daina Mazutis, they interviewed groups of senior leaders in Canada, U.S., U.K., and Hong Kong. They asked what went wrong with leadership and what can we learn.

In the interviews Crossan was struck by how often participants raised the issue of character. “The words ‘character’ and ‘ethics’ kept coming up,” she says. “But there was a lot of confusion about what character really meant, and whether it was something that could be learned.”

In one of her projects Crossan is building a model of character and ethical decision making with co-authors Gerard Seijts and PhD student Daina Mazutis. They began with a four-step process created by James Rest, a scholar who made major contributions in the study of ethical development. His process starts with moral awareness, and then proceeds to moral judgement, moral intent, and finally moral behaviour.

When looking back at the events that led to the financial crisis, it’s evident that many leaders lacked the first step in Rest’s process, moral awareness. Even in hindsight many refuse to accept responsibility, instead blaming the crisis on impersonal forces, such as “the system,” or “complexity.”

Rest’s model provides a step-by-step process, but doesn’t offer any guidance as to what’s ethical and what’s not. To explore this at a deeper level, Crossan and her colleagues looked at three major philosophical approaches to ethics. “Consequentialism” takes a utilitarian or cost-benefit approach to ethics. “Deontology” is based on the idea of universal duties.

A third approach, the one preferred by Crossan, is that of “virtues ethics.” This is based on the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, recently advanced by the work of professors Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman. Aristotle believed that the goal of human existence was the pursuit of excellence, or virtue. He also believed that this pursuit was founded on the notion of habitual practice.

Peterson and Seligman identified six universal virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, temperance, transcendence, and justice. They assigned to each virtue a number of “character strengths.” For example, the virtue of wisdom is associated with the character strengths of creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, and perspective. The virtue of temperance is associated with the character strengths of forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self-control.

Opposing these character strengths are societal norms and situational pressures. Mandela faced such pressures when he decided to reach out to the rugby team of white South Africa. In displaying the character strength of forgiveness, he evinces the virtue of temperance. “One must have incredible individual strength to make ethical decisions in the face of these enormous forces,” says Crossan. “But if you’re not anchored by character strengths, you’ll end up blowing in the wind.”

Although character strengths and virtues are an essential pathway to Rest’s four-step process, Crossan felt there was still a piece missing in the model. “What we lacked was the motivation for people to act repeatedly in the pursuit of excellence of character.”

This insight brought her team to the work of social psychologist Shalom Schwartz, and his idea of motivational “values.” A value is a belief that one mode of conduct is preferable to its opposite. For example, some people will value openness to change as opposed to tradition and conformity. Another example is self-enhancement (power and achievement) versus self-transcendence (universalism and benevolence).

Moral awareness will differ depending on the values you hold, says Crossan. “If you value change over tradition you’ll likely view an ethical decision differently. But the key is to anchor the value in the character strengths, because the likelihood of making a good quality ethical decision is dependent on those character strengths.”

Rest’s model suggests that ethical decision-making is a linear process, beginning with moral awareness and ending with moral behaviour. Crossan argues that it’s a circular process, with time for deep reflection based on the outcome of a particular behaviour. That reflection in turn enlightens one’s moral awareness.

Crossan emphasizes the notion of experience and habitual practice in the model they are developing. “It’s through the learning experience that we deepen our ethical frames and see future situations differently,” she says. “At Ivey, we’re hoping that the leadership teaching we give our students and managers can help them learn about the importance of moral character and how to deepen it.”

Professor Crossan holds the Taylor/Mingay Chair in Business Policy.

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