Good leadership as informed by virtue: Exploring scholarly and public views

Addressing complex problems requires collective action, and enabling collective action requires good leadership. From a scholarly perspective, good leadership can be understood as emerging from and being enacted as virtues such as courage, wisdom, humanity, and justice. However, it is unclear how this scholarly understanding of good leadership aligns (or not) to public understanding of good leadership. This paper takes the top 25 TED talks on leadership as a public perspective of good leadership and analyzes them to assess which virtues are used explicitly and metaphorically to describe good leadership. Dichotomous views between scholarly and public views of good leadership are flagged, and a notion of good leadership as mapped in the public domain is distilled. Implications, limitations, and future research are discussed."