How and why could some stories be construed as sacred in organizations, and what functions does the sacred have in organizational values work? Research has shown how values can be made formative of a range of organizational purposes and forms but has underscored their performative, situated, and agentic nature. We address that void by studying the sacred as a potentially salient yet under-researched realm of values work. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of a faith-based health care organization and the (...) ethical philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, we describe how the sacred is figured in two sets of tales that were lived and told with surprising intensity and consistency: the parable of the Good Samaritan and the tale of the legacy bestowed by the organization’s founder. We theorize how this figuring of the sacred in story and in action recasts values work from a centralized and unitary process to a two-way learning dialectic between the ongoing creative imitation of action and narrative. Values in the shape of stories of the sacred do not achieve their meaning as unchangeable cores or sanctioned beliefs. Rather, they come to life in a process of ongoing moral inquiry that co-evolves with moral agencies. In the latter regard, the sacred primarily becomes manifest in everyday work in the form of questioning and creative acts of care. People become moral agents when they feel and respond to the sacred in the call of the other. (shrink)

Background:Ethical leadership is important for developing ethical healthcare practice. However, there is little research-based knowledge on how to stimulate and educate for ethical leadership.Objectives:The aim was to develop and investigate the feasibility of a 6-week web-based, ethical leadership educational programme and learn from participants’ experience.Training programme and research design:A training programme was developed consisting of a practice part, where the participating middle managers developed and ran an ethics project in their own departments aiming at enhancing the ethical mindfulness of the (...) organizational culture, and a web-based reflection part, including online reflections and coaching while executing the ethics project. Focus group interviews were used to explore the participants’ experiences with and the feasibility of the training.Participants and research context:Nine middle managers were recruited from a part-time master’s programme in leadership in Oslo, Norway. The research context was the participating leaders’ work situation during the 6 weeks of training.Ethical considerations:Participation was voluntary, data anonymized and the confidentiality of the participating leaders/students and their institutions maintained. No patient or medical information was involved.Findings:Eight of the nine recruited leaders completed the programme. They evaluated the training programme as efficient and supportive, with the written, situational feedback/coaching as the most important element, enhancing reflection and motivation, counteracting a feeling of loneliness and promoting the execution of change.Discussion:The findings seem consistent with the basic assumptions behind the educational design, based partly on e-health research, feedback studies and organizational ethics methodology, partly on theories on workplace learning, reflection, recognition and motivation.Conclusion:The training programme seems feasible. It should be adjusted according to participants’ proposals and tested further in a large-scale study. (shrink)

In this chapter, I discuss institutional leadership vis-à-vis the value of poverty. To do so, I analyse how poverty has been conceptualised within a Catholic religious organisation, the Jesuits. The chapter shows that, in the Jesuit case, poverty is not strictly defined. Instead, poverty results from the constant dialogue between the individual Jesuit and their leader. This means that the understanding of what constitutes poverty is neither explicit nor implicit. The chapter contributes to our understanding of institutional leadership as the (...) promotion and protection of values, as per Selznick’s classical definition. However, we discuss a less known part of Selznick’s work in which the ambiguous character of values is highlighted. In this sense, and after the Jesuit case, we advance the possibility that the promotion and protection of institutional values by institutional leaders does not necessarily imply the definition of what a value is. As values are not defined beforehand but the result of a constant dialogue between the leader and their followers, institutional leadership can be revisited and freed from the heroic view that has long characterised it. (shrink)