Responsible leadership after the global financial crisis: The morality of control and self-management

The global financial crisis starting in 2008 has created a need for fundamentally new ideas and paradigms in business ethics (Natale and Sora 2010). This paper adds to this growing literature by advocating that the intangible and tacit nature of knowledge in the knowledge based society of the 21st century, exacerbates the problem of moral agency in today's organizations, making the boundaries and accountability of decision making especially vague and ambiguous. One potential response to this greater uncertainty and ambiguity in knowledge based organizations is the concept of "precommitment" or "selfcommand," the idea that an actor performs an observable action at one point in time to increase the probability of an action at a later time. "Burning one's bridges" in a battle is a common phrase describing the extreme degree of self-command. This paper applies this concept as a means to enhance moral agency to organisations in the context of the knowledge based society, and as a key part of, responsible leadership after the global financial crisis of 2008.