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The Many Paths to Covenantal Leadership: Traditional Resources for Contemporary Business

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Abstract

Many corporate managers are increasingly looking to the covenant model for inspiration, guidance, and most of all, practical business wisdom. While some managers seemingly exploit the religiously inspired language of covenant for purely self-interested reasons, other managers and executives like Tom Chappell of Tom's of Maine, Max De Pree of Herman Miller, Aaron Feurstein of Malden Mills, and C. William Pollard of ServiceMaster, express an authentic attachment to the idea. While these executives have been the most articulate and the most extreme spokesmen for the application of the covenant model for business, other companies have attempted to benefit from the concept, albeit in less explicitly religious terms. Our research suggests that the most fundamental answer to the question of what makes a "business covenant" work is – covenantal leadership. Simply put, but easily forgotten, the one thesis which emerges over and over again in our research is that covenantal organizations require covenantal leadership. Covenantal leadership is not a single characteristicor virtue, rather there are many paths to covenantal leadership. This article introduces some of these andexamines their applications to contemporary business.

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... that exist within the energy system, the reciprocity loop between leader and member within which trust and power are exchanged.Covenantal PolarityCaldwell and Karri's (2005) link to covenantal relationships created a window for the polarity perspective on the nature of the leader-member dyad where commitment and empowerment are shared voluntarily.Pava (2001) defined the covenantal relationship as independent agents creating a shared community with three pillars: open-ended, long-term, and respectful of human integrity. Pava recognized a polarity in the third pillar that is often missed in stewardship theory: "human freedom requires a background of social order, and social order presupposes ...
Research Proposal
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Much research to date has focused on moving organizations from a current state of governance that has become dysfunctional to a future state of governance that will be the fix to their problems. This often creates a pendulum swinging between the agency and stewardship models of governance, between control and collaboration, and between individual freedom and organizational commitment. Public sector managers are further challenged when operating within a construct built to emphasize controls and bureaucracy while working daily with real human beings with motivations and individual views. The leadership imperative then involves finding balance between competing but interdependent values inherent in this organizational paradox. A polarities perspective suggests organizations will often favor one of the governance methods to the neglect of the value in its interdependent pairing. However, leaders who want to be effective in this paradoxical world will operate from a “both/and” mindset, rather than “either/or.”
... This can extend across cultures, with contributions explaining the ethical particularities of, for example, leadership in non-US (the default culture) countries such as Japan (Taka and Foglia 1994;Witt and Stahl 2016). A related series of contributions bring what are sometimes called 'traditional' (Pava 2001) or faith-based (Wang and Hackett 2016) ethics to understanding leadership. There is not always a clear differentiation between the secular metaphysical and the religiously spiritual, perhaps reflecting what Weber observed in the sociocultural dedifferentiation of religious belief systems during modernity, placing them alongside secular systems of thought such as humanism and Marxism (Bell and Taylor 2016). ...
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