Business Innovation Management: a General Overview to Virtuous Leadership

The concept of leadership continues to develop as a concept that still maintains its importance. In the most general sense, leadership shapes employees’ behaviours and facilitates all processes to achieve common goals and objectives. In today's innovative and rapidly changing business world, practical and good leadership is an important study topic in management studies. Effective and good leadership, also known as positive leadership, motivates ineffective employees, develops their skills, improves negative attitudes and behaviours and copes with stress and burnout. Positive Psychology is the newly advancing field of organisational behaviour sciences. Positive leadership highly addresses its relevance with positive character traits as defined virtue. Virtues, which are the source of well-being and glorify people's feelings, thoughts and behaviours, manifest as business ethics principles in business life. The virtues play an influential and vital role in various leadership styles, such as ethical, spiritual and transformational leadership. On the other hand, these leadership styles do not extensively define the core characteristics of a virtuous leader. In this direction, over the past decade, numerous virtuous leadership theories and models have recently developed that cite virtues as essential and indispensable. A review of previous studies revealed a gap in the literature on virtuous leadership. The problem of this study is that virtuous leadership has been examined in primarily ethical literature. This study aims to conceptualise by examining the prominent approaches of virtuous leadership according to the current literature. Traditional literature scrutiny is used as the research method in the paper. Studies are scattered in the relevant literature. This paper summarises the existing virtuous leadership literature and brings out a literature review. The study provides an overview of virtuous leadership theories and models among the definitions and classifications listed in Table 1 and also presents virtues-relevant leadership theories in the literature. Thence, it is expected to contribute to management, leadership and organisational behaviour. The research is a current study in terms of the subject discussed.