Leadership lessons from Levinas: revisiting responsible leadership

Abstract

This essay offers a Humanities approach to leadership scholarship by viewing the practice of responsible leadership through the lens of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s ethics is phenomenologically inter-subjective where in temporal human encoun- ters the face of the Other commands responsibility. Levinas’s philosophy has been utilized in business ethics scholarship, but has limited presence in leadership studies. Through an interpretive analysis, this essay first demonstrates the connection between ethics and leadership, and then illuminates six primary leadership lessons from Levinas in order to philosophically orient and enlarge the contemporary practice of responsible leadership.