Culture Influencer: Dr. Timothy Ewest

Rev. Dr. Timothy Ewest, Associate Professor of Management, Prince-Chavanne Chair in Christian Business Ethics and Chair of the Department of Management, Marketing and Business, was asked to contribute to the Handbook of Global Leadership and Followership, a Springer Publication. The book was edited by Satinder Dhiman and Joan Marques of Woodbury University, June Schmieder-Ramirez of Pepperdine University and Petros Malakyan of Robert Morris University. The handbook was thematically intended to integrate the best Eastern and Western leadership and followership theories and practices and to this end leading international scholars from a diverse religious and theoretical background were invited to participate in this book project.

Dr. Ewest’s chapter endeavored to aid the reader in understanding the role that leadership can play in addressing incivility within global communities as a means to help mitigate corresponding social and environmental problems. This chapter was intended to address a growing concern we face since globally, incivility and social unrest engender an antagonism toward environmental concerns demonstrated in resource hoarding and entitlement regarding resource utility, thus, social unrest and environmental degradation have a symbiotic relationship. To this end, this chapter explored how leadership needs to be reconceptualized because of its problematic neglect of intrapersonal values, including religious values and beliefs. The neglect of intrapersonal values is seen in three historically accepted limits of fostering others-directed leadership, which in turn prohibits leaders from connecting leadership behaviors to ethically based actions. Therefore, the chapter argued that leadership, to build social equity and build trust to move communities forward, must also be centered on prosocial values and understand group behaviors and the developmental process and growth of leaders as well as the groups they lead. Finally, the paper resolves by outlining Ewest’s (Prosocial leadership: Understanding the development of prosocial behavior within leaders and their organizational settings. Springer, 2017) prosocial leadership development process as one example of this new leadership paradigm.

For more information, visit the Springer Link website