Beyond Profit: Rehumanizing Commercial Leadership
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This research thoroughly analyzes the ethical and human ramifications of commercial leadership, contesting the prevailing profit-centric paradigms that characterize organizational success in the twenty-first century. Using multidisciplinary literature from leadership studies, corporate ethics, and social psychology, it contends that modern commercial leadership frequently overlooks its human obligations, reducing employees, consumers, and communities to mere data points and productivity metrics. This study employs Lebanon as a contextual framework to demonstrate how profit-driven logic develops in unstable economies, where inadequate institutional frameworks exacerbate the effects of dehumanized decision-making. The research, via conceptual investigation rather than empirical inquiry, reveals the "silent costs" of commercial leadership fatigue, cultural erosion, inequity, and loss of trust, demonstrating how these factors impair long-term organizational and societal resilience. It juxtaposes market-oriented strategies with nascent human-centered frameworks, including regenerative, humanistic, and morally defiant leadership, each advocating for a leadership style rooted on empathy, moral fortitude, and sustainability. The report advocates for a paradigm shift in the evaluation of leadership achievement from "How much did we sell?" to "How effectively did we serve?" Contending that genuine leadership should be evaluated based on its ability to develop dignity, belonging, and communal welfare. For Lebanon and other countries undergoing crisis and change, this rehumanization of leadership signifies both a moral obligation and a strategic requirement for restoring confidence and societal stability.
Source: Figshare
Author: El Halabi, Nadine
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7090464202
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