The Sound of Silence – A Space for Morality?
The Role of Solitude for Ethical Decision
Making
Kleio Akrivou
Dimitrios Bourantas
Shenjiang Mo
Evi Papalois
ABSTRACT. Building on research and measures on sol-
itude, ethical leadership theories, and decision making lit-
eratures, we propose a conceptual model to better
understand processes enabling ethical leadership neglected
in the literature. The role of solitude as antecedent is ex-
plored in this model, whereby its selective utilization
focuses inner directionality toward growing authentic
executive awareness as a moral person and a moral manager
and allows an integration between inner and outer
directionality toward ethical leadership and resulting
decision-making processes that will have an impact on
others’ perceptions of leader authentic ethical leadership.
Thus it is proposed that utilization of solitude positively
predicts executive-level authentic ethical leadership action
and in turn, ethical decision making perceived fairness and
integrity. We also propose two moderators, strengthening
the hypothesized (positive) association between solitude
and ethical leadership; these are the executive’s ability for
moral reasoning and a motivation for socialized (as opposed
to personalized) power.
KEY WORDS: ethical leadership, solitude, business ethics,
ethical decision making
Introduction
This article’s primary task is identifying and describing
executive capacities to selectively utilize solitude as a
space to authentically orient oneself as a moral person
and a moral manager, thus increase authentic ethical
leadership and in turn others’ perceptions of fairness
and integrity in executive decisions. The attention to
the role of solitude in energizing processes of ethical
leadership is largely neglected in the current ethical
leadership literature, although it is consistent with the
call for more research on antecedents of ethical lead-
ership.
Our model comes at a time when executives face
increasingly complex demands (Waddock, 2007,
2008) when there is a documented shift from the
industrial to a new ‘‘knowledge era’’ (Uhl-Bien
et al., 2007) are coupled with societal and markets
concerns for increasing integration of financial,
social, environmental, and technical concerns that
were not part of the executive performance areas
(Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang, in press; Paine,
2003). Our model also emerges from the growing
lack of trust in the answers research on ethics pro-
vides to respond to the fact of numerous executive
corruption scandals – epitomized in the Enron case –
dominating the scholarly and popular press and
literature (Trevino et al., 2003) for at least the first
decade of this century, and academic research
revealing an abundance of immoral or amoral lead-
ership (Khuntia and Suar, 2004; Trevino et al.,
2003).
While scholars have repeatedly stressed the need
for more intentional ethical leadership by executives
(Brown and Trevino, 2006), it is perhaps meaningful
to wonder if the contextual pressures of the shift
away from the industrial era to the globalized and
technologically inter-connected fast pace ‘‘knowl-
edge era’’ (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007)isitself a key factor
that significantly handicaps executive time and space
available for authentically reflection on morality and
ethics concerns. Outside the need to further research
individual personality level predictors which is of
course necessary, little research has been done on
processes that enhance psychological mechanisms
that facilitate the executive capacity for maintaining
control to keep ‘‘swimming against the tide’’ (the
contextual ‘‘press’’ to the reduction of time for
concern for ethics), and instead facilitate substantial
Journal of Business Ethics (2011) 102:119–133 Ó Springer 2011
DOI 10.1007/s10551-011-0803-3