A Crisis in Leadership: Transforming Opportunistic Leaders into Leaders that can be Trusted

Abstract

Business leaders often rely on the power of their authority to influence their employees. Recent workplace surveys however have found a growing distrust in a business leader’s authority. While such distrust has been increasingly associated with abuses in a leader’s authority, leadership research has primarily focused on the positive outcomes of leadership. The task of this study is to develop a conceptual model of leadership to address this shortcoming. In drawing Transaction Cost Economics (TCE), a concept of opportunistic authority was developed to explain employees’ distrust in their leader’s authority. This opportunistic authority is defined by a legal and moral opportunism in which a leader in a position of authority seeks to beguile, cloak and / or deceive employees of their legal and moral responsibilities. Legitimacy is identified as a solution to overcoming this opportunistic authority. Specifically, a leader’s efforts to develop pragmatic and moral forms of legitimacy develop normative expectations in upholding a leader’s legal and moral responsibilities. These normative expectations reduce a leader’s legal and moral opportunism and develop employees’ trust in the leader’s authority. A contribution of this study is that it not only offers a “darker side” explanation of leadership, but it also introduces a legitimizing process that can transform “ass**le” leaders into leaders that can be trusted.