The Ethics of Relational Leading: Gender Matters

This article is concerned with the ethical implications of conceptualizing and enacting leadership as a relational practice, rather than as a heroic-individualistic performance. Using a small empirical study, it explores the possibilities and challenges of becoming an ethical subject against the pressures on leaders to instrumentalize and masculinize their relational work. Ethics is understood as a critical reflexive practice through which leaders come to understand the effects of their conduct and are able to transform or restyle themselves. This fashioning of an ethical subject is discussed in relation to the construction of masculinized certainty and feminized self-doubt. The article concludes with some tentative thoughts about the capacity of embodied subjects to transgress dominant modes of being and acting.