356 Global Ethics for Leadership
28.2 Modern Moral Leadership Models
In an organisation, the moral leadership is depicted on three levels:
competitive advantage within the industry, operational efficiency in its
business process, and distributive justice among its members. External-
ly, it is tested by the reputation earned among stakeholders primarily
through its commitment and contribution to the organisation’s social
responsibility. For a long time, the expectations on the leaders have been
excessively focused on the fair distribution of economic outcome, ignor-
ing the greater objective of leading the organisation towards its sustain-
able growth. Thus, such leaders tend to prioritize and exhaust their ef-
forts on the issue of distribution rather than enhancing the organisation’s
overall capacity. In communicating with the members of the organisa-
tion, Chinese leaders in state-owned organisations are constantly over-
burdened by paper works and meetings. Leaders on the stage can’t stop
themselves from their enthusiastic speeches while the audiences simply
pretend to listen. Even with the great number of red-tape documents
distributed, no actual impact exerts on the subordinates. All of these
show that, even with such advanced information technologies and civi-
lized society as of today, the formalism of communication is without
any doubt outdated.
Diversified organisational structure requires different methods for
the moral leadership and its effectiveness. In a spike structure (1), the
leadership comes in force from the top down, which promotes moral
unity but jeopardizes value diversity. The umbrella structure (2) is simi-
lar to the spike structure except that the leadership may diverge from
each other as compared with the former type. In a Flip H structure (3),
there is a chance that the junior level may be diversified and produces
peer influence, with the risk that the field leadership may come into
shape as a confrontation force to its counterpart on the top. The satellite
structure (4) assures the core status of leaders, but this also weighs much