'Dignity and Leadership: Implications of Leaders' Language and Their Assumptions of Human Nature
Greg Latemore
Introduction
Echoing the initiative to reconnect management theory with social welfare (Pirson and Dierksmeier 2014), this chapter focusses on human dignity as it applies to leadership theory and practice. Leaders’ assumptions of human nature underpin their behaviour (Fahrenberg and Cheetham 2008; Heslin and Vande Walle 2008) and influence the extent to which they respect the dignity of their employees.
In particular, it is proposed that the language which managers employ may either reinforce dignity in the workplace or not, and that the language of dignity transcends the inspirational language which might, at times, be needed. With an eye to investigating this phenomenon further, the chapter reports on exploratory field research testing assumptions of
G. Latemore (h)
Latemore Consulting, UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Australian Catholic University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 M. Kostera, M. Pirson (eds.), Dignity and the Organization, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55562-5_8
human nature by eliciting the descriptors used by practising managers for people in the workplace. We investigate the language of dignity among managers and the relative impacts of that language through two small empirical studies. As will be seen, one recognises mutual respect at work via workplaces which foster cultures of diversity (Strachan et al. 2010), as well as by those which use dignity-affirming language, which transcends any relative value among people (Pirson and Dierksmeier 2014).
In another contribution to this volume, it is argued that current trends towards human capital, organizational citizenship behaviour, and high- performance human resource management (HRM) practices might in fact be working against a respectful approach to employees, and therefore may diminish dignity in the workplace. The chapter begins by addressing an apparent gap in the literature between dignity and leadership, and it concludes by inviting further research into the theoretical bedrock of dignity beneath the language employed by leaders in the workplace.
