Ethical Leadership: Reframing Moral Complexity and Power through a Philosophical Anthropological Perspective in Organizational Practice

Abstract

While ethical leadership has been extensively theorized in Western organizational contexts, its enactment in Muslim educational institutions remains underexplored, particularly in settings where religious authority, communal life, and unequal power relations shape moral practice in ways that normative frameworks struggle to capture. Drawing on philosophical anthropology, especially MacIntyre’s tradition-based ethics and Lambek’s ordinary ethics, this study examined how ethical leadership is enacted in the everyday institutional life of Pondok Bantan in Southern Thailand, an information-rich critical case where traditional religious authority and modern administrative demands intersect. A qualitative single-site case study was conducted, with data generated from in-depth interviews with 28 participants, twelve months of participant observation, and institutional document analysis. Reflexive thematic analysis followed Braun and Clarke, with credibility secured through prolonged engagement, triangulation, member checking, and peer debriefing. The analysis identified five interrelated dimensions of ethical leadership: emergent moral authority, contextual ethics grounded in Islamic tradition, moral negotiation across power relations, embodied ethical practice, and vulnerability-centered leadership. Authority did not flow from formal position but was continuously built through teaching, mentoring, and shura-based interaction, indicating that ethical leadership operates as a relational and context-sensitive practice rather than a fixed code. Single-site interpretive design supports analytical rather than statistical generalization. The study advances an anthropological framework of ethical leadership that moves beyond normative trait-based models by integrating tradition, embodiment, vulnerability, and power, offering implications for leadership development in pesantren, madrasah, and Islamic higher education across Southeast Asia.