Abstract:
Delivery of organisationally-based social work services poses ethical leadership challenges for the profession. Transformative changes arising from new public management thinking have exercised powerful constraints on formally appointed social work leaders as well as peer-recognised informal leaders. Practitioners experienced intellectual and emotional dissonance as their professional values were challenged by neo-liberal organisational thinking. A seminal examination of how legitimate leadership should be expressed took place as a ‘power-over’ (Follett, 1995) model of leadership assumed organisational pre-eminence. Leadership intended to motivate, secure commitment and change how people feel was undermined. Follett’s vision of followers becoming leaders was replaced by a tangible sense of powerlessness. Social workers found themselves functioning in the operational reality of marginalisation as a parody of their ethical code of empowerment in practice, captured by Carey’s description of market philosophy ‘colonising’ state sector social workers (Carey, 2008, p. 919). The authors argue that these developments mandate social work leadership research in the context of ethics and integrity—critical to exercising organisational political power. This paper applies critical theory to leadership in social work agencies to analyse and address tensions between ethical practice and organisational imperatives. Drawing from the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) Statement of Ethical Principles, national codes of ethics and relevant literature, the authors propose an ethical social work leadership model integrating practice values of power-sharing, authenticity and spirituality; servant leadership; personal and professional integrity; indigenous leadership approaches and biological complexity thinking. The purpose is to offer practitioners an alternative professional discourse to counter dominant managerialism and restore a social work leadership identity.