Humanistic Leadership Practices: Exemplary Cases from Different Cultures

ISBN-13: 9783031343650 / Angielski

Pingping Fu

Spis treści

Foreword

It will be written by Dr. Ernst von Kimakowitz, co-founder of Humanistic Management Network.

 

Introductory Chapter

The introduction will be written by the editor to provide a framing for and an overview of the content of the book.

 

Why humanistic leadership? How does it differ from other leadership theories?  

Humanistic leadership refers to a leadership style that integrates components in most of the existing leadership theories. It is distinct from the rest of the theories because it highlights the leadership purpose being people and the dynamics of the relationship between the leader and the followers. Specifically, humanistic leaders are those, who (1) respect people as holistic human beings by taking care of their own needs as well as their followers’ multiple needs and motives; (2) continuously improve themselves while developing the followers to unleash their full potential and (3) recognize and try to consider all stakeholders’ interests while striving to pursue the common good (Fu, Kimakowitz, Lemanski & Liu, 2020).  Such leaders are particularly needed now because the business world has increasingly recognized the limitations of the economistic orientation that has dominated the business world since the Renaissance, and more and more companies are trying different ways to sustain their businesses other than pushing the employees. Employees are also looking forward to satisfying multiple needs rather than merely the physical need.

            The introduction will offer a brief introduction of each of the main leadership theories and discuss how it connects to and differs from humanistic leadership. The existing theories, such as transformational leadership, authentic leadership, servant leadership, moral leadership, ethical leadership, paternalistic leadership, all contain some of the elements of humanistic leadership in them, but none contains all the components. For example, transformation leadership promotes transformational leadership behaviors such as inspirational stimulation and individualized care, but they do not take into consideration the moral base of the leader, which is why Bass and Steidlmeier (1999) labeled those leaders as pseudo transformational. Basically, the existing theories focus on what leaders do. Although some of them mention leaders’ moral values, those values are not incorporated into the theories. Most importantly, all the outcomes of these theories were on performance at different levels, individual, group or individual; or variables that have been shown to influence the different level of performance, such as creativity, work engagement, citizenship behavior, commitment, leadership effectiveness, follower helping behavior, identification and job satisfaction. Nevertheless, humanistic leadership theory is comprehensive and dynamic. It includes both the leader and the follower, the characteristics and the practices, the performance and happiness. Humanistic leaders are committed to making people happy by helping them grow and building the firms to serve the community and create the common good.

            A summary of each of the chapters in the book will also be to offered to provide readers an overview of the book.

 

Chap 1. A Humanistic Leader Engaging Employees through Cultivating Habitual Behaviors

        FU, P.P., QU, Q., & HAN, J.N.

 

A key difference between humanistic and other types of leaders is the way they influence followers. Humanistic leaders believe in educating people because they know the power when people understand the meaning and rationale, and want to do a good job themselves. Using Mao Zongqun, founder and CEO of FOTILE, China’s leading kitchenware brand, as a focal case, the chapter introduces the specific ways Mao adopted to help frontline workers as well as managers at various levels to internalize the company core values and use them to guide their own behaviors.

These practices are described as “Five Ones” because they each represent one single behavior a person needs to commit him/herself to doing on a daily basis. Specifically, they refer to (1) setting up an inspirational life goal, (2) reading one classic book within a specific period of time, (3) correcting one fault or form a good habit over a particular period of time, (4) exhibiting filial piety daily/weekly and (5) doing one good deed every day. Since they were first proposed by Mr. Mao in 2018, the Five Ones practices have been adopted by tens of thousands of employees in the company. They have brought so many positive changes in the branches all over the country that Mao considers the Five Ones a core mechanism of defining and nurturing Fortile’s company culture and more importantly, helping employees cultivate their own inspirations and inspire them to fulfil the value of their own life.

The Chapter will use many examples from various interviews conducted for various other projects to show how Five Ones practices help change employees’ attitudes and shape their behaviors. The chapter will also introduce philosophically the differences between East and West in interpreting humanism to explain why such practices would work so effectively in the Chinese context.

 

Chap 2. Confucian humanistic leadership:

Effects trickled by Social Process

Wan-Ju Chou

In recent years, academic researchers call for a more in-depth examination for humanistic leadership in management practices. Humanistic leadership style is more people-oriented and pays attention to the fundamental values of human well-being. In response to this call, Chou and Cheng (2020) preliminarily described the conceptual blueprint of Confucian humanistic leadership from an indigenous lens. This chapter extends their work, further depicts how a Confucian humanistic leader influences his or her followers and stakeholders. The social influence process based on social learning theory, social exchange theory, and trickle effects was proposed to explain the underlying mechanisms of Confucian humanistic leadership. Mr. Chou, the founder of Sinyi Real Estate, is such a representative case of Confucian humanistic leader. As a Confucian humanistic leader, Mr. Chou displays a behavioral role model to attract followers to identify with and imitate his humanistic behaviors through direct experience or vicarious experiences (i.e., social learning). A Confucian humanistic leader authentically cares about the well-being of all stakeholders and treats followers with respect and fairness, which further activates the “norms of reciprocity” (i.e., social exchange). Both social learning and social exchange mechanisms explain the “direct” social influence process.

However, humanistic cycle is an inside-out process, which implies a positive cycle from primary stakeholders to secondary stakeholders to achieve collective welfare. Incorporating trickle effects (trickle-down, trickle-out, trickle-up, trickle-in, and trickle-around) helps explain the “indirect” social influence process. In a trickle chain, the social influence process is not direct or mutual but indirect, which explains the social influence web of Confucian humanistic leadership in organizational settings. Accordingly, this chapter provides a comprehensive understanding how a Confucian humanistic leader facilitates his or her flow of humanist virtues by trickling effects as well as social learning and social exchange perspectives.

 

Chap 3. Karl Schlecht and Putzmeister:

Salvaging a humanistic ideal amid ‘Ruthless Global Competition’

 

Dirk C. Moosmayer & Jonathan Keir

 

Karl Schlecht founded his plaster machine company Putzmeister in 1958 in south-western Germany, grew it to a world market leader in the construction industries, and sold it to SANY, a Chinese construction conglomerate, in 2012. Mr. Schlecht represents the typical founder of a German Mittelst and firm in post-WW2 Germany: His firm has its roots in a technological innovation; he fully owns and manages the firm even when it had grown to a half-billion Euro business; he leads with a patriarchal style that concentrates decision power in the hands of the founder who drives technological development, market decisions and care of his employees.

            In this chapter, we depict how the founder developed his own understanding and implementation of his normative (humanistic) leadership approach over time. In this endeavor, we engage with tensions one might observe when implementing humanistic management as founder-owner-manager and in the global construction industry that is known as harsh and rather unethical. Some of the tensions that this chapter addresses include: (1) (How) does humanism’s focus on free will and care for the individual align with leadership that is centered around an owner-founder determined to grow and defend a market-leader position in a ruthless industry? (2) How contextual is humanistic leadership and could certain leadership styles be humanistic at one point in time (post WW2) and abusive at another point in time (new millennium)? (3) How compatible is humanistic management with other philosophies, namely the protestant work ethic that Karl Schlecht grew up with?

 

Chap 4. Humanistic Leaders in Poland

Michal Lemanski

In this chapter we analyse the nature of humanistic leadership in Poland, building on illustrative examples of business leaders who apply principles of humanistic management in Polish firms. We put under scrutiny responses of these leaders to various managerial challenges they faced, to show how the universal values of humanism are translated into practices of leaders in the context of Polish culture. The culture of Poland, historically positioned at the intersection of Eastern and Western civilizations, has been shaped by different traditions and influenced by

ethical values of three great religions: Christianity, Islam and Judaism. This heritage

of cultural plurality is reflected in traditional cultural values of this nation. In its

recent history however, Poland has suffered from "unhuman" experience of war and

totalitarianism, with widespread disrespect for human dignity, followed by a period

of rapid economic and institutional transformation, during which many ethical

values have been challenged. As such, humanistic leadership is deeply rooted in the

culture of Poland, and at the same time a phenomenon new to contemporary Polish

business. Our main contributions are in showing how humanism is manifested in

business practices in a post-transformation society, in promoting practical solutions

applied by humanistic leaders who operate in such a context, and explaining how

leaders may use traditional cultural values as a catalyst for a more humanistic

business conduct.

 

Chapter 5. Humanistic leadership in the Amish community:

Leading from the edge

Charles Keim & Masoud Shadnam

With the number of leadership failures growing, there has been renewed interest in the promise of humanistic leadership (Colbert et al., 2017; Lawrence and Pirson, 2015; Pirson and Bachani, 2018; Pirson and Lawrence, 2010). The existing literature regarding how humanistic leadership figures in management practice is very limited. Our earlier work (Keim and Shadnam, 2020) explored humanistic leadership among the Old Order Amish, arguing that the organization of this conservative religious group holds critical clues for how we can humanize secular business organizations. In this chapter, we shift our focus to deal exclusively with Amish leadership, especially as it relates to change. Unlike traditional organizations, Amish leaders do not see themselves as agents of change or of leading their group to a new place or the acceptance of a new practice. Rather, the leaders perceive themselves as “watchmen on the walls of Zion”; that is, they perceive their role as protecting the community under their care. Kraybill (2001, p. 298) notes how in the Amish community change comes from the periphery: “by those living on the edge of the cultural system who try to stretch the boundaries.” While the change may originate with the edges of the community, the so-called “fence crowders,” any change must pass the vigilant eyes of Amish leadership. In this way, Amish leadership presents a paradigm that has clear advantages over traditional notions of leadership: Amish leaders do not initiate change but let the change initiatives that emerge from the peripheries come to the center stage of the community to be discussed and decided upon. The concern for sustainability is also built in this paradigm as the Amish leaders are responsible for steering the discourse with respect to not only how the change might affect the welfare of their community, but also how it may change the lives of succeeding generations. In this Chapter, we explore how Amish leaders seek to influence their communities and how they navigate the boundaries between new practices and old faith.

 

Chap 6. Building a Prosperous Society through Employees’ Well-being: Humanistic Leadership of Konosuke Matsushita and Kazuo Inamori

Kaori Ono & Jusuke Ikegami

For the past decade or so, people-centered management methods have been gaining attention among academic researchers and practitioners globally. While Japan has long had leaders who value people, there were few studies on their leadership. Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Matsushita Electric (now Panasonic), a global electronics company, is known as the “father of human-oriented management in Japan”. Kazuo Inamori, the next generation after Konosuke Matsushita, founded Kyoto Ceramic Corporation (now Kyocera Corporation) in 1959 and DDI Corporation in 1984, and rebuilt the bankrupt Japan Airlines (now Japan Airlines Co., Ltd.). Inamori is also widely recognized as a leader who respects people. Although they are from different business fields, they have not only succeeded greatly as businesspersons, but have also managed their businesses based on a deep understanding of human nature. They often visited the Gemba, listened to the voices of employees, and kept abreast of what was happening at Gemba. Also, their leadership extends beyond the organization to the society.

Comparing and examining these two leaders will reveal the essence of humanistic leadership that has not changed although time changes.

 

Chap 7. Faith, Family, and Firms: A Case Study of Bob Chapman

Leigh Anne Liu & Cazembe Monds

Humanistic leaders can be understood as individuals who “respect people as holistic beings, improve themselves as well as their followers, and who recognize all stakeholders’ interests while pursuing the commons good”. One such case of an individual that has grown into a humanistic leader is Mr. Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry-Whemiller Machinery Company. Prior to inheriting BWMC, Bob had a rather traditional understanding of management. He believed that managers told people what to do because of their knowledge and expertise, and that their positions created a unique dynamic in which they “manipulate others for their own success”. Though, after becoming the president of Barry-Whemiller, Bob quickly took it upon himself to transform the company culture into one that puts its people before its profits.

Within this chapter, we will explore how Bob’s faith, his family, and his firm’s organizational culture have influenced and been impacted by his practices. After the literature review, we will discuss how firms can learn from the changes Mr. Chapman implemented within Barry-Whemiller, and how they can address concerns regarding three important organizational aspects: diversity, equity, and inclusion. This chapter will then close with a brief summary of the case shared, including some implications for managers today.

 

Chap 8. Humanistic leadership: A UAE perspective

Yaprak Anadol

Humanistic leadership has become an important approach in management literature. Although the conceptual grounding of the “humanism” manifesto goes back to many centuries, building a humanistic leadership theory in social sciences is a relatively new attempt. Development of humanistic leadership theory has become the focus of academic researchers, especially from the lens of culturally diverse context. This chapter extends one of these attempts aiming to understand humanistic leadership practices and behaviors in the United Arab Emirates, through a prominent humanistic leader (Anadol & Behery, 2020) and aims to reveal how the cultural structure of the country, its traditions, customs and the point of view of the rulers of the country affect the humanistic leadership approach in the context. It is found that leader's humanistic leadership approach is generally influenced by three main cultural factors, Bedouin traditions, Islamic values and the National agenda of the UAE. The themes like humility, care, respect, wellbeing orientation, and generosity It is interesting to see the communalities on how the country’s leader and the prominent leaders’ humanistic approaches and how they coincide. This chapter will provide an overview of these examples and try to link those to humanistic leadership theory by explaining how a humanistic leader implements humanistic leadership approaches in the UAE context.

 

Chap 9. Do Humanistic Leaders Navigate the Organizational Paradoxes Better? Perspectives from the Leadership in the Tata Group

Ritu Tripathi

During the second wave of the Covid-19 devastation in India, Tata Steel made an unprecedented announcement: the surviving family of the employees who lost their lives during the pandemic, will get the last drawn salary, with the medical and housing benefits, till the deceased employee’s retirement age of 60. To any profit-making, capitalistic corporate organization, this would not make much sense. While short-term financial help during the Covid crisis had been heard of in other organizations, Tata Steel’s announcement was way out of the ordinary.

            The history of the Tata Group is full of such examples, when the leaders seem to deal with paradoxical pursuits with elan— for example, financial gains on the one hand, and commitment and service to the stakeholders and the community, on the other. Organizational paradoxes are features that are at once interdependent and contradictory (Johansen, 2019). Conceptually, these are different from other related concepts such as ethical dilemmas, in that, “unlike continua, dilemmas, or either/or choices, paradoxical tensions signify two sides of the same coin” (Lewis, 2000, p. 761). These are experienced as contradictions or “cognitively or socially constructed polarities that mask the simultaneity of conflicting truths” (p. 761) and “that obscure the interrelatedness of the contradictions” (p. 762). Because there is an underlying unity in the seemingly disparate sides, approaching the contradictions in paradoxical relationship from an “either/or” perspective is not recommended (Lewis, 2000; Johansen, 2019).

            I would showcase, using secondary sources of data such as media interviews, social media posts, some of the examples and fresh perspectives on how the leaders in the Tata Group deal with organizational paradoxes. The paper would try to provide insights in the contemporary paradox literature also from the Indian social and cultural context and integrate it with the theoretical tenets of the Humanistic Leadership.

 

Chap 10. Humanistic Leadership in Africa:

A Relational Ideal of Maat  

Baniyelme D. Zoogah

Humanistic leadership has been part of Africa since the pre-modern era (i.e., ancient Egypt) through the Maat philosophy. Maat is a philosophy of the people of ancient Kemet or black Egypt. It “is a fundamental, pervasive, and enduring element in ancient Egyptian civilization and an inclusive and defining cultural category” (Karenga, 2004:5). Such leadership is particularly significant in this era of the Africa Union Agenda 2063, which views one of the critical success factors for the achievement of the Agenda as “leadership and political commitment with transformational and visionary qualities at all levels and in all fields.” This view is also encapsulated in the World Economic Forum which indicates that “Africa doesn’t need charity, it needs good leadership”. In addition, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, advocates effective leadership in Africa, established an award for good national leaders and a proprietary index that gauges the quality of governance and leadership in African countries (Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2015). This award has not been won in eight of the twelve years because no leader has been found worthy of the award.

The chapter integrates historical, anthropological, and philosophical accounts of leadership in Africa to situate humanistic leadership in modern Africa. The framework is limited to the period before the colonial eras of Africa (i.e., the Kemetic era). Following a brief review of extant leadership in Africa, I discuss the Maatian view of humanistic leadership. Scholars conducting research on humanistic leadership in Africa have an indigenous philosophical basis to ground their studies. Humanistic leadership is proposed as a function of decisions and actions of African traditional orientations that derive from Maat philosophy. This perspective unearths the source of modern understanding of humanistic leadership and reorients the field with regard to leadership development and prevention of bad leadership as they relate to management of organizations in Africa.

 

Chap 11. “Pero no mucho”: Ambivalence and legitimacy pressures

in Humanistic Leaders’ self-accounts in Latin American

Miguel P. Caldas

In this Chapter, the author presents how Brazilian leaders in both humanistic and performance-oriented cultures define their leadership orientations, and to what extent they perceive humanistic leadership to be part of their ethos or something to aspire to. A total of 50 interviews were conducted between 2019 and 2020 with 50 leaders in 30 firms in the Brazilian landscape that are regarded for their stance in this debate: 15 firms are considered exemplary cases of humanistic leadership, and 15 are regarded as pillars of “performance culture”. In some firms more than one leader was interviewed, to either triangulate or reduce potential social desirability biases. The results of the content analysis were surprising: firstly, leaders from both sides of the spectrum tended to defend their respective leadership approaches, but generally claimed non radicalness, as if attempting to appease their internal and external detractors. Leaders in companies seen as highly representative of the “performance culture” approach tended to claim their leadership stances were either progressing to more humanistic, or yet were in fact more humanistic than they were perceived to be.  Conversely, leaders in companies seen as highly humanistic tended to advocate their firms were not too soft, and either had uncredited performance- and/or profit-orientation undertones or were changing to have more balance. In many cases, top management team interviewees portrayed their firms as humanistic as some of their peers claimed the opposite, further demonstrating the ambivalence on leadership orientation self-accounts surrounding humanistic leadership and its critics.  Overall, results showed that while on one hand Brazilian leaders seem to be affected by the typical Latin American cultural trait of plasticity and ambivalence (Caldas & Wood, 1997), on the other leadership faces institutional legitimacy pressures to embed humanistic values, albeit not at the cost of a perceived departure from performance concerns, which fuels a tendency to reinforce an ambiguous rhetorical debate about what they really are or claim to be.

 

Chap 12. Humanistic Leadership and Sustainable Development:

The Case of Good Ark in China

FU, P.P., QU, Q. LIN, B.X.

The last chapter of the book is added because of the theme: humanistic leadership practices directly help fulfilling the UNSDGs it presents. We will use the case of Good Ark, the leading diodes manufacturer in China, to show how a single company can help promote the UN 17 SDGs by building itself into a humanistic company. Mr. Wu, the founder of the company, Chief Education Officer and honorary Chairman of the Board, developed eight modules in 2009 when he publicly pledged to build the company into a happy enterprise and set up the new mission of spreading the teachings of the sages to benefit mankind. The chapter will introduce how the eight modules -- (1) humanistic care, (2) humanistic education, (3) green environment, (4) health promotion, (5) philanthropic actions, (6) voluntary services, (7) recording and publicizing humanistic actions and (8) fulfilling role responsibilities – connects to the SDGs. Mr. Wu believed humanistic education should be at the core because it lays the foundation for all the other modules/SDGs.

The chapter will present various examples collected from personal interviews with various people in the company and the secondary data gathered from various channels to illustrate how the eight modules were carried out and how they each connect the a few of the SDBs. We will also introduce Confucian values and explain why such strategies would work in the Chinese context, and what conditions are needed for companies in other countries to learn from them.  

O autorze

Pingping Fu is a Professor of Business at Nottingham University Business School China. She was a board member of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavioral Effectiveness (GLOBE) research project team and has led a dozen research projects supported by grants from Hong Kong government. Her works have been published in various journals, including the Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Leadership Quarterly, Management International Review, and Organizational Dynamics.

Blurb

This edited volume offers a comprehensive analysis of humanistic leadership, bringing together authors with experience working in different cultures to demonstrate that humanistic leadership exists everywhere and has enabled companies to sustain all over the world.

There is a high volume of evidence that executive education has significant influence in the decisions of executives and upper managers in business, government and other institutions. However, in spite of the many different leadership theories in existence, there is a severe deficit of research and literature addressing the specific needs of organizations for integrating the human dimension. This book highlights different cultural case studies from around the world to demonstrate that humanistic leadership is the model that best enables employees to thrive and businesses to sustain. Part of the popular Humanism in Business series, this book will be of great interest to academics, students and practitioners of leadership and human resources.

“People are realizing that leadership today requires more than just managing an organization well for the purpose of maximizing profit. In this important book, several authors explore the defining characteristics and behavior of what are becoming known as ‘humanistic leaders’. Humanistic Leadership in Different Cultures is a powerful and inspiring accompaniment to bodies of work about servant leadership and quantum leadership, and adds the dimension about how these are practiced in different cultures. I recommend it highly.”

• Danah Zohar, Author of The Quantum Leader and Zero Distance