Leadership Philosophies: “Honeybee” vs. “Locust”

This post is about two extremely different philosophies on “how to run a business” and their implications and requirements to leadership. The idea to compare these two tremendously different leadership approaches, which has been used by Avery and Bergsteiner in their book “Sustainable Leadership”, is picked up and discussed (Avery and Bergsteiner, 2011).

The locust philosophy is also known as neo-liberalism, common law or shareholder-centric-model. Its main economic, legal and social mission is to maximize the wealth of the owners. A good example for this philosophy is Copelands Paper “expectation-based management” (Copeland and Dolgoff, 2006). Hence it is not surprising that the locust approach does not require any kind of partnering with the society or a critical view on the environment and instead solely focusses on the shareholder’s value by providing short-term profit. Words like “tough, ruthless, asocial and profit-at-any-cost” are strongly associated with locust leaders. A good example of economic problems that can arise from locust philosophy is the bankruptcy of ENRON, which was caused by “creative accounting”. Only later, the whole dimension of unethical behavior became apparent (Sims and Brinkmann, 2003). Another good example of locust philosophy is the paper of Stalk and Lachenauer (two SVP’s of the Boston Consulting Group) in which they promote their “hardball” approach with statements like “plagiarize with pride … steal any good idea … The nicest part of playing hardball is watching your competitors squirm” (Stalk and Lachenauer, 2004).

The Honeybee philosophy which is also known as Rhineland capitalism, stakeholder-centered-model or the continental-model, instead focusses on partnering with the society, long-term goals and stakeholder orientation. The main philosophy behind this approach is that a company can just be sustainable if the basic needs of all involved parties are taken into account as well as the interest of the future generations. Avery states that “A business led under honeybee philosophy cares for and develops its people, tries to protect the planet, cares for the local communities in which it operates and protects its image and brand trough ethical behavior”.

One can conclude that ethics and moral are not part of the locustic approach. Furthermore, followers of the neo-liberal philosophy do not believe in Win/Win situations mentioned in the first section of this document, but are focusing on short-term goals. As stated by Avery, “…the idea of the locust philosophy is that one’s own advantage can be archieved only by making others suffer”. In contrast the Honeybee approach requires Moral, Ethics and a Shared Vision with all Stakeholders. (Avery and Bergsteiner, 2011).

The Apropriate Leadership Approach

Given the summary from the sections above, a leader has to establish a shared vision and purpose in order to reach a common understanding and to establish a moral and ethical code of conduct when moving towards Corporate Sustainability.

As different stakeholders are involved, this may not be an easy task to accomplish, especially as additional traits may be required for the leader to be successful. While good communication and trust building are still some of the major success points, other traits like “influencing” and “sensemaking” become more important in this scenario. Warde mentioned that the greater the range of challenges, the more a practice can deliver internal goods to a larger number of people (Warde, 2005). This can be connected to MacIntyre’s conclusions towards practicing and Kolb’s and Agyris’ work around double loop learning (Argyris, 2002) as well as the concept of “Transformational Leadership” mentioned first by Burns (Burns, 1978) and then extended by Bass (Bass, 1991).

While different other leadership theories draw upon the concept of vision, for example Visionary Leadership by Nanus (Nanus, 1992) or Charismatic Leadership (Shamir et al., 1993), transformational Leadership mentioned above and Authentic Leadership (Avolio and Gardner, 2005) try to implement purpose - thus also moral and ethics - as a key task for leaders. (Bass, 1991)

Sustainable Leadership: Six Phases

Based on Dunphy’s theory of “six phases of sustainability”, it can be argued that an organization is on a journey from a position of active antagonism to sustainability, while not implying that every organization has to start its journey from scratch as it might have already implemented certain ethical commitments. (Benn et al., 2014)

Conclusion

Summarizing the sections above, a leader who wants to address issues of purpose and sustainability must have strong ethical and moral values as well as a vision that one is able to share with all stakeholders. By influencing and sensemaking, the leader will earn more trust and commitment towards the shared vision and values.

While concepts like ethical leadership focus on the “do what’s right” approach, they underestimate the power of fully engaged and passionate stakeholders. Charismatic and visionary leadership styles concentrate on the vision, while undervaluing ethics and moral.

The most appropriate leadership styles that have been identified are transformational and authentic leadership as they are combining all values of a sustainable approach.

The author furthermore strongly believes that “passion” and the ability to “enlighten” followers to make them passionate about what they are doing is one of the key traits of a successful leader. This gets more important if ethics and moral become part of the “big picture”.

Bibliography

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AVERY, G. C. & BERGSTEINER, H. 2011. Sustainable leadership: Honeybee and locust approaches, Routledge.

AVOLIO, B. J. & GARDNER, W. L. 2005. Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive forms of leadership. The leadership quarterly, 16, 315-338.

BASS, B. M. 1991. From transactional to transformational leadership: Learning to share the vision. Organizational dynamics, 18, 19-31.

BENN, S., DUNPHY, D. & GRIFFITHS, A. 2014. Organizational change for corporate sustainability, Routledge.

BURNS, J. M. 1978. leadership. NY. Harper & Row.

COPELAND, T. & DOLGOFF, A. 2006. Expectations‐Based Management. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, 18, 82-97.

NANUS, B. 1992. Visionary Leadership: Creating a Compelling Sense of Direction for Your Organization, ERIC.

SHAMIR, B., HOUSE, R. J. & ARTHUR, M. B. 1993. The motivational effects of charismatic leadership: A self-concept based theory. Organization science, 4, 577-594.

SIMS, R. R. & BRINKMANN, J. 2003. Enron ethics (or: culture matters more than codes). Journal of Business ethics, 45, 243-256.

STALK, G. & LACHENAUER, R. 2004. Hardball. Harvard Business Review, 82, 62-71.

WARDE, A. 2005. Consumption and theories of practice. Journal of consumer culture, 5, 131-153.