84 Ducere Est Servire: THE LEADERSHIP JOURNAL OF DALLAS BAPTIST UNIVERSITY directed purposes. It does not take a tremendous amount of insight to see how this severs the act of leadership from an inherent moral compass, allowing the leader to justify any and every decision based on pragmatism or external reward rather than virtue. This leadership dilemma is essentially a contextualized restatement of the general moral dilemma of whether the ends justify the means. Virtue-based leadership, on the other hand, presupposes that the excellence of right action and right motivation by the acting agent, in this case the leader, is central to the definition of good leadership. “TO BE OR NOT TO BE” GOOD: SELFISH LEADERS DON’T LAST This is a needed corrective in more ways than one. While leadership theorists have debated for decades whether leaders are born or made, a virtue-based and formational approach to leadership reframes the question. Whether or not the raw capacities for leadership exist in only a select few or in everyone at birth, the virtue ethicist would hold that good leadership depends on the content of one’s character as much as or more than one’s natural aptitudes for leadership.32 This tradition of virtue and practical wisdom (phronesis) spans millennia, whereas modern leadership studies have posited various theories, models, and perspectives in less than one century, with mixed results.33 Thus, a virtue-based approach to leadership that is based in classical wisdom literature speaks to the universal human condition while modern leadership studies often operate in compartmentalized and competing ways.34 This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it recognizes that leadership as a field of study has been situated within modernity and postmodernity. Since the enlightenment, such forces as humanism, colonialism, industrialization, globalization, secularism, Freudian psychology, Nietzschean nihilism, and social Darwinism have converged to elevate a hyper-individualism and bankrupt institutions of their mythos that once gave them relevant and substantial meaning. Additionally, virtue-based leadership does precisely what modern theories and models of leadership have not done: it provides sufficient justification and motivation for the value of mutual respect and cooperation. Northouse states that “leaders have the ethical
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