The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67 – 81

The ethics of authentic transformational leadership

Terry L. Price*
Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173, USA

Abstract

In response to worries about the morality of transformational leadership, Bass and Steidlmeier
[Leadersh. Q. 10 (1999) 181] distinguish between authentic transformational leadership and inauthentic
or pseudo-transformational leadership. The present article analyzes the conception of authenticity at the
core of this normative account of leadership. I argue that the distinction between authentic
transformational leadership and pseudo-transformational leadership fails to ground a sufficient
response to ethical concerns about transformational leadership. To the extent that this theory holds that
altruism suffices for ethical success, it misses the fact that leaders sometimes behave immorally
precisely because they are blinded by their own values. In the end, we can expect that this kind of
blindness will come to bear importantly on the moral psychology of leadership and, in some cases,
encourage transformational leaders to believe that they are justified in making exceptions of themselves
on the grounds that their leadership behavior is authentic.
D 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

In Act 1, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s (1987) Hamlet, Polonius councils Laertes: ‘‘This above
all, to thine own self be true . . .’’ (p. 837 [78]). Polonius’s endorsement of authenticity is
certainly no stranger to the leadership literature. Bennis and Nanus (1985), for example, tell us
that ‘‘[l]eaders acquire and wear their visions like clothes. Accordingly, they seem to enroll
themselves (and then others) in the belief of their ideals as attainable, and their behavior
exemplifies the ideas in action’’ (p. 46). Similarly, Fairholm (1998) claims that ‘‘[t]he leader’s
task is to integrate behavior with values’’ (p. 57), and Heifetz (1994) encourages ‘‘[a]daptive

* Tel.: +1-804-287-6088; fax: +1-804-287-6062.

E-mail address: tprice@richmond.edu (T.L. Price).

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68 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81

work . . . to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face’’ (p.
22). Gardner (1990), in his book On Leadership, articulates the ethic behind the Shakespear-
ean dictum this way: ‘‘One of the tasks of leadership—at all levels—is to revitalize those
shared beliefs and values, and to draw on them as sources of motivation for the exertions
required of the group’’ (p. 191). On each of these views, leadership puts behavior in line with
values so that we might be true to ourselves.
Even the most influential moral treatise in the field, Burns’s (1978) Leadership, can be read
as an argument about the kinds of selves to which leaders should be true. ‘‘That people can be
lifted into their better selves,’’ he says, ‘‘is the secret of transforming leadership . . .’’ (p. 462).
In fact, Burns thinks that it is the possibility of this kind of transformation that gives leadership
its moral purpose. On this normative account of leadership, ‘‘The leader’s fundamental act is to
induce people to be aware or conscious of what they feel—to feel their true needs so strongly,
to define their values so meaningfully, that they can be moved to purposeful action’’ (Burns,
1978, p. 44). In essence, this form of leadership transforms people from the selves that they are
into the selves that they should be. As a result of the transformation, people are poised to be
true to their better selves.
In its characterization of the selves to which we should be true, transforming leadership
contrasts sharply with transactional leadership. Whereas transforming leadership raises
leaders and followers to ‘‘higher levels of motivation and morality’’ (Burns, 1978, p. 20),
transactional leadership takes the selves to which we should be true simply as given. The
transactional leader ‘‘recognizes the other [party to the exchange] as a person. Their
purposes are related, at least to the extent that the purposes stand within the bargaining
process and can be advanced by maintaining that process. But beyond this the relationship
does not go’’ (Burns, 1978, pp. 19–20). In other words, transactional leadership adopts a
markedly uncritical view of the selves engaged in these exchanges. This form of
leadership appeals to us simply as we are, whatever our desires and preferences might
be and regardless of their perhaps questionable normative force. In comparison with
transforming leadership, then, transactional leadership fares poorly on what Burns (1978)
calls ‘‘the ultimate test of moral leadership’’ (p. 46). Leadership must have the ‘‘capacity
to transcend the claims of the multiplicity of everyday wants and needs and expectations’’
(p. 46).
This means that the selves to which we should be true must be identified with something
higher than mere desires and preferences. In response to this challenge, advocates of
transforming leadership offer a view of the self on which we might understand the
distinctively moral agenda of leadership. According to Burns, for example, our better selves
are identified with values that lead to the satisfaction of real need, and transformational
leaders work from the perspective of these values to get us to act in accord with our better
selves. Or, as Bass (1985) puts it, they achieve the requisite transformation ‘‘[b]y raising our
level of awareness, our level of consciousness about the importance and value of designated
outcomes, and ways of reaching them’’ (p. 20). When this transformation is complete, value
congruence within the group, organization, or society gives rise to behavior that is itself
congruent with these values. Transformed followers can now act on the values they have
come collectively to accept.
 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81 69

Transformational leadership also assumes that leaders have knowledge of the value levels to
which followers should be raised (Rost, 1991). Since there is congruence between the values
transformational leaders hold and what really is valuable, these leaders—unlike the followers
they aim to transform—know the importance and value of designated outcomes. This kind of
value congruence is necessary if leaders are to be true to their better selves and, moreover, to
get followers to be true to their better selves. So, when untransformed followers fail to act in
accord with what really is valuable, their behavior can perhaps be attributed to ignorance about
what values ought to be pursued. To put it in Burns’s (1978) language, followers sometimes act
on what they want because they do not know what it is that they need. But we cannot appeal to
this kind of ignorance to explain ethical failures of transformational leaders. By hypothesis,
transformational leadership ‘‘operates at need and value levels higher than those of the
potential follower’’ (Burns, 1978, p. 42). As such, transformational leaders ‘‘are distinguished
by their quality of not necessarily responding to the wants of ‘followers,’ but to wants
transformed into needs. Leaders respond to subjective wants and later to more objective needs
as leaders define those wants and needs’’ (Burns, 1978, p. 69, emphasis added).
An analysis of the ethics of transformational leadership is thus closely connected to the
question of why leaders behave immorally. On the standard view in applied ethics and moral
theory, ethical failures are essentially volitional, not cognitive (Carey, 1992; Hampton, 1989,
1990; Keeley, 1998; Ludwig & Longenecker, 1993; Moody-Adams, 1994). We behave
unethically because of problems of will, not because of problems of belief and knowledge.
Alternatively put, although we have epistemic access to the requirements of morality, we are
moved by self-interest to do something other than what we morally ought to do. This account
of ethical failure supports the assumptions about belief and knowledge that characterize the
theory of transformational leadership. When transformational leaders fail to do what morality
requires of them, it is not because these leaders are mistaken about how they should pursue
what is valuable. Rather, it must be because they selfishly choose to act in ways that they know
they should not.
In this article, I challenge the assumption that we need to worry only about the ethics of
transformational leadership when a leader’s self-interest competes with what she knows she
morally ought to do. As with all theories that lean heavily on the volitional account of ethical
failure, the theory of transformational leadership underestimates the complexity of the moral
psychology of leadership. First, such theories miss the fact that the threats to ethical leadership
cannot be reduced to egoism. Secondly, they ignore a peculiar cognitive challenge that
leadership brings with it: Leadership can induce and maintain a leader’s belief that she is
somehow excepted from moral requirements that apply more generally to the rest of us (Price,
2000). Here, for example, I have in mind prohibitions on manipulating rational agents, on using
oppressive means to secure legitimate ends, and on harming innocents (Kant, 1964). Even
transformational leaders can come to believe that they are justified in violating these
prohibitions. Such leaders fail to do what they should do, not because of self-interest but
because they think that generally applicable moral requirements are overridden by the other-
regarding values to which they are committed. It follows that transformational leadership can be
morally troublesome regardless of whether the leaders who exercise it are true to their better
selves.
70 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81

2. Authentic transformational leadership

In a recent article in this journal, Bass and Steidlmeier (1999) distinguish between authentic
transformational leadership and inauthentic or pseudo-transformational leadership. Following
Burns (1978), Bass and Steidlmeier suggest that authentic transformational leadership is
grounded in ‘‘a moral foundation of legitimate values’’ (p. 184). To articulate the notion of
legitimacy, Bass and Steidlmeier claim that this form of leadership is characterized by behavior
that is ‘‘true to self and others’’ (p. 191). This characterization signals that authenticity is
indexed to values that reflect more than just the interests of leaders. As Bass and Steidlmeier
make the argument, ‘‘the exclusive pursuit of self-interest is found wanting by most ethicists.
Authentic transformational leadership provides a more reasonable and realistic concept of
self—a self that is connected to friends, family, and community whose welfare may be more
important to oneself than one’s own’’ (pp. 185–186). It can thus be understood as representing
‘‘an ideal moral type’’ (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 191) against which the behavior of
leaders can be judged at the level of character, the values they pursue, and the processes in
which they engage with followers (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 182).
The fact that authentic transformational leadership looks to ‘‘commitments beyond the self’’
(Gardner, 1990, p. 190) does not mean that there is congruence between the values of leaders
and followers. Being true to self and others is not meant to imply that the actions of leaders will
conform to the values that followers actually hold. Followers may fail to recognize the values
advocated by authentic transformational leaders as reflecting their interests, and there is no
guarantee that they will eventually come to this recognition. After all, it is the goal of this form
of leadership to transform people so that they might accurately identify their real interests as
members of a group, organization, or society and come to accept the values that would serve to
advance these interests. A commitment to authenticity, then, does not directly address
inequalities in power that might allow transformational leaders to impose their values on
others, especially on those with minority interests (Keeley, 1998). Rather, what such a
commitment does is ensure that a leader will pursue ‘‘a cause that transcends . . . her individual
egoistic needs, a cause that benefits the larger community’’ (Lipman-Blumen, 1996, p. 245).
Bass and Steidlmeier recognize that because the components of transformational leadership
are themselves morally neutral, the theory must constrain the ways in which transformational
leaders can be legitimately motivated. In this respect, their argument for authentic transforma-
tional leadership concedes that when ‘‘the gifts of charisma, inspiration, consideration, and
intellectual strength are abused for the self-interest of the leader, the effect on followers ceases
to be liberating and moral, and becomes instead oppressive and ideological’’ (Carey, 1992, p.
232). Here, they draw upon the work of Howell and Avolio (1992), claiming that ‘‘only
socialized leaders concerned for the common good can be truly transformational’’ (p. 186).
Authentic transformational leadership thus guards against abuses of self-interest by requiring
that leaders act on socialized, as opposed to personalized, power motives (Howell, 1988). As
Bass and Steidlmeier (1999) put it, ‘‘The authentic are inwardly and outwardly concerned
about the good that can be achieved for the group, organization, or society for which they feel
responsible’’ (p. 188). In other words, only when the values from which they act are altruistic
in content can we assume that their leadership is morally legitimate. The relationship between
 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81 71

the values and behavior of authentic transformational leadership is illustrated in quadrant 1 of

Fig. 1.
Transformational leadership is inauthentic when leaders lack a commitment to altruistic
values or behave in ways that are out of line with these values. As we might expect from Bass
and Steidlmeier’s (1999) characterization of authenticity, the inauthenticity that characterizes
pseudo-transformational leadership is ultimately grounded in failures of volition. Although
pseudo-transformational leaders know what they ought to do given the other-regarding values
they may readily claim to accept, they act against these values for the sake of self-interest. Bass
and Steidlmeier suggest, for example, that such leaders are ‘‘predisposed toward self-serving
biases’’ (p. 190). Most obviously, this motivational predisposition can undercut a leader’s
authenticity in either of two ways: It can lead her to be untrue both to self and to others or,
alternatively, to be true to self but untrue to others. Aristotle (1985) would call these pseudo-
transformational leaders incontinent and base, respectively, and he makes the relevant
distinction this way: ‘‘In fact the incontinent person is like a city that votes for all the right
decrees and has good laws, but does not apply them . . .. The base person, by contrast, is like a
city that applies its laws, but applies bad ones’’ (p. 197 [1152a20]). In other words, the
incontinent person achieves value congruence but not behavioral congruence, whereas the
base person exhibits behavioral congruence but lacks value congruence.
Corresponding to Aristotle’s distinction, we can derive two versions of pseudo-transforma-
tional leadership. On the first version, pseudo-transformational leaders have at least some
commitment to altruistic values but, nevertheless, act against them to satisfy self-interest.
Accordingly, we can call them incontinent pseudo-transformational leaders and depict the
relationship between their values and their behavior in quadrant 2 of Fig. 1. Although

Fig. 1. A two-dimensional framework for authentic and pseudo-transformational leadership.

72 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81

incontinent pseudo-transformational leaders can be motivated by values that reflect the

interests of others, these values are sometimes insufficient for motivation when there is a
strong temptation to act egoistically. Perhaps Bass and Steidlmeier (1999) would appeal to this
version of pseudo-transformational leadership to make sense of how leaders who ‘‘see
themselves as honest and supportive of their organization’s mission’’ can nevertheless act in
ways that are ‘‘inconsistent and unreliable’’ (p. 187). At least some of Bill Clinton’s presidency
might also be understood by appeal to this way of thinking about pseudo-transformational
leadership. It appreciates the fact that temptations to deviate from altruistic values can be very
strong for leaders, especially when the by-products of success undermine normal incentives to
behave morally (Ludwig & Longenecker, 1993).
On the second version of pseudo-transformational leadership, leaders are committed to
egoistic values, and their actions reflect these values. Such leaders can be referred to as base
pseudo-transformational leaders, and the relationship between their values and their behavior
is represented in quadrant 3 of Fig. 1. There is a sense in which the base pseudo-
transformational leader is true to self, but the problem is that she is true to ‘‘an inner self
that is false to the organization’s purposes’’ (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 187). To the extent
that egoistic values were behind the utilization of questionable partnerships at Enron, company
executives might be characterized in terms of this version of pseudo-transformational
leadership. On this motivational assumption, the allegation that Enron executives inflated
profits to get rich off of stockholders and employees is unsurprising given the values to which
they were committed. It is for this reason that we might be inclined to attribute their behavior to
baseness, not incontinence. Unlike leaders on the first version of pseudo-transformational
leadership, these leaders hold what are ultimately the wrong values.
A third version of pseudo-transformational leadership falls outside of the Aristotelian
framework. On this version, leaders sometimes act in ways that advance the interests of others.
However, when they so act, their concern for these interests is merely instrumental. In other
words, pseudo-transformational leaders of this sort are motivated to act in accord with what
seem to be altruistic values because of a contingent connection between this kind of behavior
and their own egoistic values. As such, we can label them opportunistic pseudo-transforma-
tional leaders and portray the relationship between their values and behavior in quadrant 4 of
Fig. 1. This way of thinking about pseudo-transformational leadership is consistent with a
plausible interpretation of the behavior of religious charlatans such as Jim Baker, and it is
implicit in Bass and Steidlmeier’s (1999) claim that pseudo-transformational leaders choose to
do what is wrong when doing what is right ‘‘conflict[s] with their own narcissistic interests’’
(p. 189). Ultimately, the real commitment of these leaders is to egoistic values. It turns out,
though, that self-interest is often well served by behavior that has the appearance of having
altruistic origins.
All three versions of pseudo-transformational leadership assume the volitional account of
ethical failures of leadership. Ethically failed leaders recognize that their conduct is not
grounded in altruistic values, but they engage in this conduct nonetheless in the belief that it is
in their self-interest to do so. When incontinent pseudo-transformational leaders allow their
desires and preferences to override their commitments, these leaders may be weak willed, but
they are not mistaken about what they morally ought to do. Base pseudo-transformational
 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81 73

leaders similarly put self-interest ahead of what they know to be altruistic values. In their case,
however, they do so because they subordinate these values to the values of egoism.
Opportunistic pseudo-transformational leaders who ‘‘mislead, deceive, and prevaricate’’ (Bass
& Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 188) must also be aware of the disparity between the values to which
they espouse commitment and what really motivates their actions. Otherwise, they would be
unable to take advantage of this disparity to satisfy their self-interest. On all three versions of
pseudo-transformational leadership, then, ethical failure can be attributed to problems of will,
not to problems of belief and knowledge. Opportunistic leaders care about ‘‘justice, equality,
and human rights’’ (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 192), for example, only when it is in their
self-interest to do so, base leaders do not care about these values at all, and incontinent leaders
simply care too little.

3. The ethics of authenticity

Can leaders fail ethically even when they are unwilling to deviate from the requirements of
morality for the sake of self-interest? The critique of authenticity turns on the claim that the
threats to morality cannot be reduced to egoism. Opposition to this claim is rooted perhaps in
a standard assumption in many of the social sciences that human behavior, whether in its
moral or immoral varieties, can be adequately explained by an appeal to self-interest.
However, drawing on recent social scientific research (Dawes, van de Kragt, & Orbell,
1988; Sears & Funk, 1990), Miller and Ratner (1996) conclude that individual self-interest
often has less explanatory power than do personal values and a concern for collective
outcomes (p. 25). Put another way, people sometimes act on altruistic values for the good of
their group, organization, or society. In fact, as we have seen, this is just what authentic
transformational leadership assumes (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 188). For the purposes of
the present analysis, though, the question this assumption raises is whether altruistic values
and a concern for collective outcomes can themselves compete with morality.
Hampton (1990) introduces what can be taken to be alternative threats to morality in the
following passage:
Normally, one opposes morality for the sake of self-interest, which may or may not be
rationally tutored. This is why the question, ‘Why are we immoral?’ is so naturally
answered by saying, ‘Because we’re selfish.’ A legal norm might also come to oppose the
moral authority, and the agent might be tempted to serve that norm, rather than the more
important moral norm. Whatever the source of temptation, the agent gives into it when
she installs that source over morality as her reason-giving authority. (pp. 16–17)
The most obvious way of reading this passage is to say that agents are tempted to serve norms
that compete with morality because so doing serves their self-interest. For example, a citizen
obeys an unjust law to avoid punishment or, in keeping with office norms, a worker lies for a
sexually predatory boss to avoid being fired.
It is worth noting that this understanding of the threats to morality makes their normative
force purely derivative. People conform their behavior to competing norms because of a
74 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81

contingent connection between these norms and desire satisfaction. In other words, these
threats to morality have no independent normative force. Their force is derived from the fact
that violating them would negatively impact self-interest. However, there is little reason to
assume that people conform their behavior to norms that compete with morality only based on
a link between these norms and desire satisfaction. Indeed, we might expect that at least some
individuals and groups will abide by competing norms even when so doing conflicts with the
rational pursuit of self-interest. An extreme example is the behavior of the September 11
hijackers. The most straightforward explanation of such behavior is that people can believe
that alternative norms, which in this particular case were quasi-religious norms, have greater
authority than the norms of rationality and, as a consequence, require the sacrifice of self-
interest.
More critical to the purposes of this article, people can mistakenly believe that these
alternative norms have greater authority even than generally applicable moral requirements. In
some cases, we might want to attribute the cause of this kind of ignorance to features of the
situation itself. Commenting on the Milgram (1974) experiments, Doris (1998) suggests that
‘‘perhaps experimental pressures prevented some of his subjects from recognizing their
situation as one where the moral demands for compassion towards the victims should override
their obligation to help the experimenter’’ (p. 511). In other cases, however, the importance of
the goods served by an alternative norm is mistakenly believed to justify an exception when it
comes to the application of a general moral requirement. By way of example, in a follow-up to
the famous study of helping behavior called ‘‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’’ (Darley & Batson,
1973), Batson et al. (1978) found that a subject’s perception of the importance of his task was
significant with respect to whether he would help an individual in need.
If moral authority can run up against the force of alternative norms in just this fashion, then
so too can generally applicable moral requirements come into conflict with ‘‘the good that can
be achieved for the group, organization, or society for which [leaders] feel responsible’’ (Bass
& Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 188). Truman almost certainly had the good of others in mind when he
deviated from the general moral prohibition on killing civilians and authorized the dropping of
the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moreover, there is reason to think that he was
sincere in the conviction that he was justified in making an exception of himself. Truman later
wrote in his memoirs that he ‘‘never had any doubt that it should be used’’ (Glover, 1999, p.
104). We might assume that Lincoln and Roosevelt were similarly motivated in their wartime
efforts to circumvent Congress and public opinion (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999, pp. 192 and
198). Even if we grant that Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Truman were ultimately justified in their
decisions, it can hardly be denied that all three faced significant tensions between generally
applicable moral requirements and the other-regarding values to which they were committed.
On the assumption that authentic transformational leaders are not tempted to deviate from
the requirements of morality because of self-interest alone, the search for potential sources of
immorality thus fixes on the beliefs that these leaders hold about the normative force of their
altruistic values. Specifically, it focuses on the belief that these values sometimes trump
generally applicable moral requirements. When authentic transformational leaders fail
ethically, they must mistakenly believe that their behavior is ultimately justified because the
importance of ‘‘the good that can be achieved for the group, organization, or society for which
 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81 75

they feel responsible’’ (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 188) outweighs the moral costs of
deviating from these requirements. This consideration grounds the central ethical worry about
authentic transformational leadership. In practice, authenticity entails commitment to a type of
good that too easily overrides the authority of generally applicable moral requirements. Even if
authentic transformational leaders are unwilling to privilege their own desires and preferences,
they might be perfectly willing to supplant generally applicable moral requirements in service
of their other-regarding values.
Ethical success calls for more than authenticity because even authentic transformational
leaders can be mistaken about what morality requires with respect to the pursuit of values that
reflect the interests of others. Unlike pseudo-transformational leaders, they can recognize not
only the relevant moral requirement but also the authority of this requirement as it relates to
their own desires and preferences and, nonetheless, be mistaken about its normative force in a
given set of circumstances. Ethical failures of leadership result, then, when leaders over-
estimate the importance of their other-regarding values and, on the basis of this kind of error,
make moral exceptions of themselves. In some cases (e.g., Truman’s decision to allow the
deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people), respecting the relevant moral require-
ment would have protected nongroup members from the leader’s decisions. In other cases
(e.g., Mao Zedong’s use of repression, torture, and execution to ‘‘raise the standards of health
and literacy’’ and ‘‘to revive the revolutionary spirit of ordinary people’’; Glover, 1999, p.
284), respecting the relevant moral requirement would have served to protect followers
themselves.
When authentic transformational leaders are mistaken as to whether generally applicable
moral requirements apply to them, they may appeal to their altruistic values in an attempt to
distinguish themselves ethically from pseudo-transformational leaders. After all, their authen-
ticity implies that they really do have a ‘‘strong attachment to their organization and its
people’’ (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 187). Because of the justificatory force of this
attachment, they can see their behavior as morally permissible and perhaps even required
(Bennet, 1974). To the extent that followers share a leader’s values and sanction the high level
of commitment required by the ethics of authenticity, we can expect that they, too, will readily
accept the justifications that she uses to make an exception of herself. In these cases, value
congruence between leaders and followers exacerbates the moral risk of authentic transforma-
tional leadership. Therefore, it is true that transformational leaders can ‘‘wear the black hats of
villains or the white hats of heroes’’ (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 187). The practical problem,
however, is that leaders and followers sometimes fail to see all the colors of their own hats.

4. The justificatory force of leadership

Why are leaders particularly susceptible to cognitive errors that result in ethical failure? The
answer to this question underscores the fact that leadership is bound up with the notion of
justification and that this link structures the moral psychology of leaders (Price, 2000). Most
important for the present discussion, leadership brings with it special normative expectations
about the importance of pursuing collective goals. These expectations play a justificatory role
76 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81

in the way that we think about leaders and in the way that they think about themselves. For
example, the most obvious way to assess leaders is by checking for congruence between
behavior and the collective goals to which their positions of leadership commit them. One
relevant line of justification for their actions, then, is indexed to these goals. It is the tight
connection between leadership and this line of justification that makes the ethics of
authenticity so attractive to leadership studies in the first place. Authenticity puts leadership
behavior in line with goals that represent the interests of the group, organization, or society.
Ciulla (1998a) was the first to note that our definitions of leadership have always been rich
in normative connotations. She argues that scholars who advance particular conceptions of
leadership have been ‘‘sloppy about the language they use to describe and prescribe’’ (p. 13).
Descriptive claims are appropriate to an articulation of ‘‘technically good or effective’’
leadership, but prescriptive claims must be reserved for ‘‘morally good’’ leadership (Ciulla,
1998a, p. 13). The temptation, of course, is to try to push the two together.
Are leaders more effective when they are nice to people, or are leaders more effective
when they use certain techniques for structuring and ordering tasks? One would hope that
the answer is both, but that answer is not conclusive in the studies that have taken place
over the last three decades. The interesting question is What if this sort of research shows
that you do not have to be kind and considerate to other people to run a country or a
profitable organization? Would scholars and practitioners draw an ought from the is of
this research? (Ciulla, 1998a, p. 14)
Here, Ciulla is concerned with the ought of morality, and she is correct to criticize leadership
scholars who draw conclusions about what one morally ought to do from nonmoral premises
about effectiveness. However, it is not quite right to say that nonmoral premises about
effectiveness are merely descriptive. Although attributions of ‘‘technically good’’ or effective
leadership are not fundamentally moral claims, they are nonetheless normative claims. These
claims attach to leaders who, in a very important way, do what they ought to do; realize
collective goals they have set out to achieve with followers. So, Ciulla’s (1998a) contention
that ‘‘definitions of leadership have normative implications’’ (p. 13) is even more to the point
than she seems to realize. In addition to its moral norms, leadership gives rise to norms of
effectiveness, and these norms play a critical role in our understanding of ethical failures of
leadership.
Expectations that leaders pursue goals that privilege group interests prove to be part and
parcel of the moral psychology of leadership. As followers, we commonly expect leaders to
put our needs first, and most leaders expect no less of themselves. Unfortunately, this
connection between leadership and effectiveness also has its moral downside. As Ciulla
(1998b) puts it, ‘‘the traits that make corporate America admire Jack Welch are the ones that
contribute most to moral amnesia, such as intense focus on reaching the next quarter’s
corporate goals’’ (p. 102). In other words, a leader’s commitment to achieving collective goals
can promote ethical failures of leadership in the same way that an individual’s belief about the
importance of her personal commitments can be an impetus to immoral behavior.
The commitment that leaders must have to group interests explains why strongly univer-
salistic ethical theories such as utilitarianism threaten to undermine the ordinary exercise of
 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81 77

leadership. The ordinary exercise of leadership gives special attention to these interests,
sometimes to the exclusion of serious concern for the interests of outsiders. Some leaders take
these particularistic expectations on their behavior to have extraordinary normative force. For
instance, in an effort to protect American officials and military personnel, the Bush adminis-
tration argued for considerable exceptions to the newly ratified International Criminal Court.
Other leaders conform their behavior to these expectations by simply redefining group
membership. Under this description, we can place the CEO who defends the claim that he is
‘‘morally justified by underscoring that the downsizing was necessary for the organization’s
survival and for the benefit of the remaining employees and other stakeholders’’ (Bass &
Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 204). Not all leaders readily engage in this kind of redefinition, but most
would be hardly recognizable if they put the interests of outsiders on a par with the interests of
the group.
The potential for conflict between this normative feature of leadership and the demands of
morality means that an appeal to a leader’s self-interest is not sufficient to fill out an account of
ethical failures of leadership. Our understanding of such failures must also attend to the
conflict between norms of effectiveness and moral norms as this conflict gets played out in
leadership behavior. That is, only by attending to normative expectations that leaders privilege
group interests can we make sense of the exceptions that we allow them and that they allow
themselves. These expectations on their behavior are well articulated in Walzer’s (1973)
argument that a political leader’s ‘‘decision to run [is] a commitment (to all of us who think the
election important) to try to win, that is, to do within rational limits whatever is necessary to
win’’ (p. 165). However, the type of justification that Walzer has in mind is by no means
limited to politics. Leaders across sectors use norms of effectiveness to justify exceptions to
generally applicable moral requirements so that they can pursue their goals, goals that
ultimately represent our interests.
When we say that a leader’s behavior is justified in this particular sense, we mean that what
she did was permissible according to or, more strongly, was required by values that reflect the
interests of the group. The justification appeals directly to these values in order to argue that
the circumstances in which a leader deviated from a general moral requirement are relevantly
different from the circumstances in which this requirement typically applies. To be sure, the
force of the justification will depend on, among other things, just how exceptional we think her
circumstances really are. It may also depend on the truth of the claim that only she has what it
takes to get the job done, that is, that she herself is exceptional. However, this claim will not be
difficult to establish for many leaders since it is the fact that they are set apart from followers by
virtue of their superior experience, motivation, and skills that puts them in positions of
leadership in the first place.
In the end, the exceptions we make for leaders may be an integral part of the relationship
between leaders and followers. Hollander’s (1964) seminal work on social exchange holds that
an emergent leader ‘‘achieves status [in the form of idiosyncrasy credits] by fulfilling common
expectancies and demonstrating task competencies’’ and that ‘‘[a]s he continues to amass these
credits he may eventually reach a threshold which permits deviation and innovation, insofar as
this is perceived by others to be in the group’s interests’’ (p. 159). Given the perceived
permissibility of these exceptions, it should come as little surprise to us that leaders sometimes
78 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81

make exceptions for themselves when it comes to generally applicable moral requirements.
One consequence of this kind of normative fluidity may well be that the justificatory force of
leadership induces and maintains a leader’s belief that she is removed from the scope of
morality. Although she recognizes the general force of moral requirements as they are applied
to others, she may fail to see that these requirements apply to her as well.
The problem for such leaders, then, is not so much that they need something akin to moral
imagination to ‘‘project alternative ways to frame experience and thus broaden, evaluate, and
even change [their] moral point of view’’ (Werhane, 1999, p. 90). After all, they may be
perfectly willing to use the appropriate ethical perspective to apply moral requirements to
followers as well as to other leaders. So, for these cases at least, it will not be cognitively
sufficient for ethical leadership ‘‘to get a distance from a particular point of view or the point of
view of one’s colleagues, one’s constituents, and/or the institutional or regulatory framework
in which one is operating’’ (Werhane, 1998, p. 88). Sometimes distance is the last thing that
leaders need. Even one who ‘‘can disengage oneself from the context of specific decisions,
from one’s particular ‘movie’’’ (Werhane, 1999, p. 62) and find the right ‘‘script’’ or mental
model to frame a moral challenge still can be susceptible to cognitive errors that result in
ethical failure. Such individuals may simply fail to put themselves in the lens of the camera
(Wickland & Duval, 1971).
Whatever the normative expectations on leaders, they must recognize that the justificatory
force of leadership often runs out when it comes up against generally applicable moral
requirements. If the pursuit of goals that represent the interests of the group means that leaders
need to deny legitimate moral demands that might be made by outsiders or by individual
followers themselves, then—noble though their goals may be—leaders should defer to these
requirements. Generally applicable moral requirements are essential when it comes to
protecting the interests of outsiders because their interests often fail to get incorporated into
the values of leaders. These requirements can be equally important to the followers, though,
especially on theories of leadership that recommend that leaders work from the perspective of
values that followers might reject. So, if leaders are to avoid ethical failure, they will
sometimes have to defy normative pressures to privilege group interests. Although these
pressures are associated with leadership itself, they often fail to justify exceptions for leaders
when it comes to generally applicable moral requirements.

5. Justification and authentic transformational leadership

To what extent does the ethics of authentic transformational leadership contribute to

normative expectations that compete with morality? The justificatory force associated with
this kind of leadership is especially high and, accordingly, so is the moral risk. First of all,
authentic transformational leadership claims to foster ‘‘the modal values of honesty, loyalty,
and fairness, as well as the end values of justice, equality, and human rights’’ (Bass &
Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 192). In contrast, ‘‘pseudo-transformational leadership endorses perverse
modal values such as favoritism, victimization, and special interests and end values such as
racial superiority, submission, and Social Darwinism’’ (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 192).
 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81 79

Admittedly, the perversity of a leader’s means or ends might well incline us properly to
identify her as a pseudo-transformational leader. But Bass and Steidlmeier’s formal character-
ization of moral means and ends creates something of a caricature of unethical leaders and, in
so doing, leaves us with an overly inclusive class of ethical leaders. In practice, it allows us to
exclude leaders of Hitler’s ilk but not much else.
What this way of making the cut between ethical and unethical leadership ignores is that the
modal and end values translate directly into moral behavior only when they are given real
content. When it comes to the modal values, for example, we would be hard pressed indeed to
determine what constitutes favoritism, victimization, and special interests without a particular
conception of fairness from which to work. Similarly, with respect to end values, even Jim
Jones’s Peoples Temple ‘‘opposed the divisions of modern society, and the invidious
distinctions of racism, and favored instead a new communal ideology in which everyone
would be treated equally and share in the common good’’ (Lindholm, 1990). Here, the point is
that most leaders can be said to support the values of authentic transformational leadership.
They disagree widely, however, on the specific demands of honesty, loyalty, and fairness as
well as on what constitutes justice, equality, and human rights. This is where the real challenge
of leadership lies, and to dismiss the importance of this challenge is to give leaders and
followers false confidence in the normative force of their own value commitments. Again,
ethical analysis must do more than identify the very worst leaders among us.
Secondly, authentic transformational leaders are set apart normatively from followers. For
instance, when authenticity is assessed at the level of character, these leaders are to be
compared to ‘‘the sage and the superior person [who] live under the restraint of virtue and aim
to transform society accordingly. The common, inferior or small person either does not know
or does not follow the way and is not a positive moral force’’ (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999, p.
195). Perhaps this is the critical distinction behind Bass and Steidlmeier’s (1999) assertion that
‘‘[a]uthentic transformational leaders may have to be manipulative at times for what they judge
to be the common good’’ (p. 186). In other words, these authors acknowledge that what is
required by virtuous character and altruistic values will sometimes conflict with what
followers take to be the morality of processes such as consent and consensus. As we have
seen, though, this kind of exception making can result in ethical failures of leadership. This is
true regardless of whether (and sometimes because) leaders are committed to the ethics of
authentic transformational leadership.
This is not to say, of course, that leaders should no longer strive for particular conceptions
of justice, equality, and human rights or, more weakly, that we should reject transformational
leadership. It is rather to say that an appeal to authenticity will not resolve whatever ethical
worries we have about this normative conception of leadership. While it would be a mistake
to deny the moral acceptability of a requirement that leadership behavior line up with values
that reflect the interests of others, undue focus on issues of authenticity can actually promote
unethical leadership. Explicitly stated, the theory of authentic transformational leadership
misses the fact that leaders sometimes behave immorally precisely because they are blinded
by these values. Virtuous though these leaders may be, their distinctive understandings of the
collective good and of the morality of the processes necessary to achieve it must be evaluated
against generally applicable moral requirements. For these requirements do not originate with
80 T.L. Price / The Leadership Quarterly 14 (2003) 67–81

them as individual leaders but, rather, as part of a much larger social and moral framework
that binds the behavior of all actors. Burns (1978) is correct, then, that ‘‘[a] test of adherence
to values is the willingness to apply principles or standards to oneself as well as to others’’ (p.
75). However, the more critical test may be one of adherence to morality. Leaders must be
willing to sacrifice their other-regarding values when generally applicable moral requirements
make legitimate demands that they do so.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Janice Baab, Joanne Ciulla, Douglas Hicks, members of my 2001 Ethics and
Leadership course, and three reviewers of this journal for invaluable comments on earlier
drafts of this article. Special thanks are due to Jody Fry for criticisms and suggestions that
greatly improved its setup and central argument. I also owe appreciation to Cassie King for
assisting with research and preparing the manuscript for publication. Finally, versions of this
article were presented at a session on the Ethical Implications of Modern Leadership Theory at
the 2001 Meeting of the International Leadership Association, at the McDonough School of
Business at Georgetown University, and at a session on Organizational Ethics at the Eleventh
Annual Meeting of the Association for Practical and Applied Ethics. I am grateful to all
participants in these sessions and, especially, to Bernard Bass for his remarks.

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