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Leadership: The Being Component. Can the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Contribute to the Debate on Business Education?

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Leadership development is first and foremost personal development, meaning that we need to go about developing the whole person.

(Muff et al. 2013).

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have increasingly dedicated their attention to analyse and reflect on the topic of leadership. However, the debate has often focused on the figure of the leader, as if being a leader were a self-sufficient function in itself, understood without finalities or independent of them. I would argue that leadership is not a position that can be assumed, but, rather, a relationship that is constructed. Similarly, the question of leaders has often given rise to a deconstruction of its components, without any insight as to how the reality is put together. Leadership cannot be understood solely from a technical or instrumental perspective. It is not a mere relational skill that simply requires developing competencies. The exercise of leadership always includes—explicitly or implicitly—a connection with values. Therefore, developing leadership is impossible without a personal process that develops the person’s capacity for perception, learning, interiorisation, explicit sense-making and constructing meaning. These issues are truly important at a time in which the debate on business education and its contribution is completely open, targeting the very core of business education’s reason for being. Though open, the debate can only become a truly dynamic discussion if there is a real dialogue between the different positions and traditions. For this reason, this paper proposes an anthropological and non-denominational reading of some of the fundamental meditations found in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius which could be used as a heuristic in the debate regarding what business schools propose. This paper represents an initial step in this direction, exploring some of the potentialities of the Spiritual Exercises for business schools that do not claim any religious tradition.

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Notes

  1. “Any good Christian has to be more ready to justify than to condemn a neighbour’s statement” (SE, 22).

  2. “I put before me a human king chosen by the hand of God Our Lord, to whom all Christian leaders and their followers give their homage and obedience” (SE, 92).

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  1. ESADE Business School (URL), Av. Pedralbes, 60-62, 08034, Barcelona, Spain

    Josep M. Lozano

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Lozano, J.M. Leadership: The Being Component. Can the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Contribute to the Debate on Business Education?. J Bus Ethics 145, 795–809 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3117-7

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