Virtues, Ethics and Corporate Citizenship: The Exercise of Leadership in Turbulent Times

Theoretical and empirical research on cardinal virtues and effective leadership in the twenty-first century within the context of numerous ethical failures as well as the environment of recent economic crisis indicate the need to define properly terms such as ‘moral responsibility’, ‘virtue ethics’, ‘moral – transformational leadership’, ‘corporate citizenship’ and to find ways to implement them into daily business practice. Our paper is organized in four distinct parts. In the first one we set briefly the nature and aims of practical reasoning. In the second one we discuss Sophocles’s Antigone as an exemplary narrative relevant to our moral argument. In the third section we examine the notions of virtues and leadership from a philosophical point of view; whereas in the fourth part we consider the issues of transformational leadership and corporate citizenship from a more practical point of view, which is implied by management and strategy theory. We complete our paper by indicating the need to go beyond Corporate Social Responsibility approaches and adhere to the notion and practices of Creating Shared Value.