Recentering Leadership around the Human Person : Introducing a Framework for Humanistic Leadership

Sammanfattning: Despite the advances of humanistic concepts in business research and practice, and the paradigmatic shift from economicism to humanism, existing leadership theory is insufficiently suited to provide solutions for a new humanistic economy as it adheres to an evidently non-humanistic logic. Therefore, this study first provides an overview of humanistic advances in business, as it aims at building a comprehensive leadership theory that is grounded in humanism. Our notion and definition of humanistic leadership is then contrasted against conventional leadership theo-ries to illustrate how they are concerned with the human person and how they oppose fundamen-tal humanistic leadership principles. Through abductively researching an in-depth case study of a firm with a humanistic organizational culture, we gather an understanding of how humanistic leadership works. By applying a summarizing qualitative content analysis, we identify the themes, dimensions and peculiarities of humanistic leadership. Finally, we provide a graphical model of humanistic leadership, which interconnects these themes and illustrates how humanistic leaders exercise self-leadership, how they approach and interact with employees, how they arrange the organizational environment, and that they are ultimately aiming for enabling employees’ self-leadership and fostering human evolvement. Hence, this study contributes to the research fields of humanism in business and leadership and offers vast possibilities for future research to further investigate how leaders can lead in a humanistic manner.