Rethinking ethical leadership using process metaphysics

Ideas and knowledge of ethical leadership as something accomplished between the leader and the led, are becoming increasingly valuable. We propose a view from process philosophy in which relations determine individual leaders and followers, not the reverse. Each individual is a locus, in which a plurality of relational determinations interacts; the ethics of leadership is situated within this. The process perspective views leadership as an occasion we experience subjectively within ourselves, instead of simply looking at it objectively from the outside. Such a process perspective, grasping leadership as an internally complex occasion of experience, has implications for our understanding of what it means to be an ethical leader.