Integrating Libertarian Paternalism Into Paternalistic Leadership

Abstract

Extant theory suggests that paternalistic leadership is not a unified construct and that benevolent paternalistic and exploitative paternalistic leader styles are independent. However, this representation ignores the emerging concept of libertarian paternalism. In order to explore this prospective style of leader paternalism, we performed a historiographically informed examination of prominent paternal capitalists from the era of industrial paternalism in the United States. We discovered that the paternalistic leadership of H. J. Heinz lacked the degree of coercion and intrusion found in other paternalistic leaders of the period, even when compared with those motivated by benevolence. As this resonated well with current notions of libertarian paternalism, we analyzed the paternalistic leadership style of Heinz alongside contemporaneous archetypical exploitative (George Pullman) and benevolent (Henry Ford) paternalistic leaders. We interpret the historical evidence to integrate the emergent idea of libertarian paternalistic choice architecture into a more comprehensive typology of paternalistic leadership.