Religious Leaders and Entrepreneurs: Synthesizing Values-driven Leadership Approaches

Abstract

One of the concerns in modern organizations is ethics, where few institutions are unaffected by scandals or abuse of power. Thus, we look for inspiration in difficult times to offer leaders and managers strategies to mitigate or prevent ethical challenges. This symposium brings together various values-driven leadership approaches to managing organizations and offers both historical and modern leadership lessons. All of the papers stem from organizations rooted in religious values that perform entrepreneurial actions to survive, yet the organizations exist in diverse contexts. Two of the papers investigate leadership and power in Benedictine organizations that have a long-standing history in values-driven leadership and offer ideas how to implement the elements of authentic, ethical, and servant leadership over time. The other two papers study the influence of religious values on entrepreneurial actions in general and in the family business context in particular. We weave the four papers together to better understand how leaders and entrepreneurs incorporate their (religious) values into their leadership styles and adapt their management approaches to engage their stakeholders. Finally, we discuss practical implications of our findings in this symposium.