Join us for discussions on leadership research

27th January 2025, at 13:00-15:00, Room DH.V.2.71 (Dalgas Have 15, Frederiksberg, DK)

Caring for Followers: Leadership and Care

PROGRAMME

PAPER 1

An Organizational Ethics of Care Approach to Mitigating Employee Invention Withholding in Commercial Organizations

By Sarit Erez, Visiting Scholar at the Technische Universität Berlin, School of Economics and Management, Institute of Technology and Management

Invention withholding—employees’ deliberate concealment of inventive ideas from their employers to avoid the assignment of ownership to the organization—entail some fundamental moral and organizational challenges. This study addresses these challenges by integrating the Ethics of Care (EoC) framework with organizational incentives practices. We theorize that a caring organizational climate is key for reducing invention withholding by fostering employees’ felt obligation toward the organization. We further suggest that the effectiveness of EOC may vary depending on the type of organizational incentive offered to employee inventors—social or monetary. Across three time-lagged survey and experimental studies, we find that EoC reduces invention withholding by enhancing employees’ felt obligation. Our findings reveal that monetary incentives for invention disclosure complement the positive effects of EoC, whereas social incentives do not enhance its impact. More importantly, we demonstrate that in the absence of ethical care treatment, all types of incentives fail to mitigate withholding, underscoring EoC as a critical precondition for addressing this behavior. These findings challenge current approaches that rely solely on incentives, highlighting their ineffectiveness without a foundation of ethical care. Our research advances theoretical discourse on EoC, deepens the understanding of invention withholding, and provides practitioners with actionable guidance for aligning ethical care with innovation strategies.

PAPER 2

Keeping up appearances. Public leaders' work environment

By associate professor, Ph.D., Camilla Sløk, IOA, CBS

While research has explored citizens’ emotions and public servants’ coping strategies in encounters of conflict, little attention has been given to the emotional stress that public managers encounter as part of their job. Drawing on 37 in-depth interviews with Danish public managers, the study highlights how blame and anger from superiors cause emotional struggles for the interviewed public managers. Despite ideals of collaboration, well-being, and psychological safety in the public sector, these encounters expose the power dynamics of hierarchy behind the scenes. Using Erving Goffman’s concepts of on-stage, off-stage, and face, the paper analyzes how managers in these tough encounters balance personal self-respect with professional roles. The findings of the study is that these encounters of blame have a steep impact on their understanding of their relationship to their superior; on their sense of self and personal self-respect. Hence, the encounters are described in violent and corporeal terms, using metaphors of these encounters with superiors as combat, camouflage, and death.

ABOUT THE SERIES

The CBS Leadership Centre wants to bring together researchers across CBS to inspire and nurture cross-disciplinary thinking on leadership. The Leadership Paper Series are a forum for doing exactly this. We invite junior and senior colleagues, as well as visiting and guest scholars, to present and discuss leadership research in progress from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical traditions. Presenters will receive constructive feedback from discussants and attendees with the aim of developing their papers and arguments for eventual publication.

Papers will be sent out to registered attendees before the event.

Let's stay connected! Interested in speaking at one of our future sessions? Send an email to Dan Kärreman dk.msc@cbs.dk or to Natalie Shefer nas.egb@cbs.dk.