62 European J. International Management, Vol. 5, No.

1, 2011

Leadership and the ‘right to respect’ – on honour and

shame in emotionally charged management settings

Alf Rehn
Department of Business Administration,
Åbo Akademi University,
Henriksgatan 7,
FIN-20500, Åbo, Finland
Email: alfrehn@me.com

Marcus Lindahl*
Department of Engineering Sciences,
Division of Industrial Engineering & Management,
Uppsala University,
Ångström 751 21, Uppsala, Sweden
Email: Marcus.lindahl@angstrom.uu.se
*Corresponding author

Abstract: Honour, as a concept, is at times seen as implicit in leadership

and the working of peer groups, but has rarely been explicitly discussed
in management studies. This paper presents honour as a key category in socio-
moral contexts, and discusses how it and related concepts, such as respect,
shame and pride, affect leadership contexts. We argue, through a discussion on
honour as it has been studied in, for example, sociology and anthropology, that
studies thereof can be a promising avenue for developing the way in which
complex leadership settings and exchanges are analysed.

Keywords: honour; respect; social feelings; group emotions; leadership;

management.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Rehn, A. and Lindahl, M.

(2011) ‘Leadership and the ‘right to respect’ – on honour and shame
in emotionally charged management settings’, European J. International
Management, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp.62–79.

Biographical notes: Alf Rehn is the Chair of Management and Organisation at

Åbo Akademi University, Finland. His research has focused on creativity in
organising and organisation studies, the ideological underpinnings of economic
theory and moralisation in management studies.

Marcus Lindahl is a Senior Lecturer at the Division of Industrial Engineering

& Management, Department of Engineering Sciences, Uppsala University,
Sweden. His research is focused on technology and organising, the social
collective in management and the dynamics of unorthodox economic
behaviour.

Copyright © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 Leadership and the ‘right to respect’ 63

1 Introduction

The issue of complex emotional responses in fraught leadership situations has been
discussed at length in management studies (e.g. Weick, 1993; Seo et al., 2004; Shepher
and Cardon, 2009), and today is recognised as a central avenue for developing a deeper
understanding of leadership in practice (Fineman, 2005). However, as Fineman (2005)
has argued, much of this research has tended to focus on emotions that might be best
understood as ‘internal’ emotions – building predominantly on frameworks developed
within organisational psychology (e.g. Fineman, 1993; Härtel et al., 2005) – and also
paid special attention to emotions that are conceived as measurable and possible to
operationalise. As the study of emotions in organisational life has matured, one of the
rallying cries has been to re-position the issue of emotions away from the personal,
private sphere, and instead see them as integral in the social nexus of modern work
(cf. Hochschild, 1979; Hochschild, 1983; Mumby and Putnam, 1992; Hochschild, 1993),
and as central building blocks in the constitution of modern work identity (e.g. Pierce,
1999; Tracy, 2000). This has led to a situation where much of the best work done on
emotional response in organisational settings has focused on the management of the self
(e.g. Tracy, 2000; Tracy, 2004) and the control of outward signs of emotionality, while at
the same time working primarily with emotions that on at least some level are seen as
internal states – joy, anger, excitement, disdain and so on.
While there is a plethora of work on the way in which emotions are socially and
culturally constructed (e.g. Harré, 1986), the great conundrum in these approaches has
been the ontological standing of emotions. While it is undoubtedly true that emotions can
be and are affected by cultural constructs such as language and means of representation
(see, however, Ekman, 1994 for alternate data), most analyses of emotions see the origin
of emotions as being the acting individual, even if this individual is seen as affected by
cultural repertoires and the ways in which identity- and emotion-work is enacted in
special social settings. If, for instance, we look to the notion of being happy in an
organisation (cf. Fleming, 2005), the underlying assumption still tends to be that there is
such thing as ‘being happy’ as an observable state, and that this state can be manipulated
and played out through a number of culturally and socially regulated ways, to the point
where the performance itself can become an integral part of identity, but still so that the
assumption of a pure, observable state is implicitly accepted. Put somewhat differently,
we may accept that organisations change the way we feel joy and sadness, regulate the
way in which we feel them, but we normally operate with the assumption that if
unaffected by social or cultural settings, we could still feel these emotions. In fact, the
notion that emotions are something internally accessible and thus only later available as
resources for identity-work permeates much of the study of emotions in organisation.
Fineman (2005, p.5) makes this explicit when he discusses interpretive analyses such as
his own and states ‘there is an important “outside” to emotion. Whatever we “have” from
our biological inheritance is overlaid, made meaningful, through the subtleties of our
cultural legacy and social intercourse’, thus arguing that there is an inside, even a
foundational one, to emotion.
This paper is an attempt to introduce a problematisation to this, one that focuses on
the oft-mentioned but little understood notion of honour. Honour, while often referred to
when discussing matters of leadership in everyday discussions, has rarely been addressed
in the literature on management, organisation and leadership, and thus remains something
of a lacuna. This becomes particularly interesting when we note that honour and related
64 A. Rehn and M. Lindahl

notions, such as shame and pride, represent a set of phenomena that do not fit in neatly
with the idea of emotions as internal state (although socially tempered and utilised in
social interaction and identity-work). Compared with, for example, anger and joy, which
can be experienced even in splendid isolation, the very notion of, for example, shame
demands the presence of an Other, someone that one is ashamed in front of. This has
obviously been noted in studies of ‘face’ (Ho, 1976; Tracy and Tracy, 1998), but these
studies have tended to focus on the relations themselves, not on the way in which these
kinds of social feelings can problematise our understanding of emotions in organisation.
This becomes particularly marked when we observe that honour, in the strictest
sense, is not an emotion at all – in that there seems to be no distinct emotional sensation
of feeling honour – but rather exists as a contextual ordering of social feelings that if
provoked can generate emotional effects such as pride, shame, anger or fear (e.g. Stewart,
1994; Aase, 2002; Welsh, 2008). Honour might in this sense be seen as a disposition that
makes specific emotions possible, but a disposition that is fundamentally social and
impossible to understand outside of its social context.
The impetus for this paper is thus that this, the complex nature of honour, represents
both an under-researched phenomena in leadership studies and a form of emotional
ordering that has the potential to problematise the manner in which emotions in
organisations have often been approached. As an illustration (rather than a full-blown
case), we take a case of leadership in fraught project work. By discussing this case as an
arena where honour and associated social feelings constitute key elements in the
organisational makeup, we wish to show the importance of comprehending issues of
honour for a theory of leadership, and argue for taking honour into consideration when
discussing emotions in organisation.

2 On group emotions and the potential of honour

Looking to the development of leadership theory (e.g. Yukl, 1989; van Seters and Field,
1990; Avolio et al., 2009), the focus has long ago moved away from so-called ‘heroic’
theories of leadership, where the leader is perceived as a solitary agent with specific
qualities (e.g. Carlyle, 1841; Bingham, 1927; Bass, 1981), to more complex theories
focusing on the inter-relationship between leaders and followers (e.g. Howell and
Shamir, 2005; Uhl-Bien, 2006; Shamir, 2007). This move has been fruitful for solving
some of the dilemmas of earlier theories, but has also introduced new complexities.
Whereas traits-based or otherwise highly individual-focused theories (e.g. Homans,
1959; McGregor, 1966; Argyris, 1976) cannot explain how leadership behaviours fail to
generate similar results across different team-contexts, more socially attuned theories
(e.g. Hollander, 1979; Avolio, 2005; Uhl-Bien et al., 2007) have been able to shed light
on the complex social interplay that is the practical context for basically all leadership.
However, this has also increased the need for robust conceptual tools for unpacking such
relationships, particularly beyond the dyadic relationships still often found at the heart of
studies into the leader-follower dynamic.
The notions of emotional labour and emotional leadership can be seen as answers
to this call, and have thus received considerable interest in recent years. Today, the area
of emotions represents a dynamic hotspot for leadership and organisation scholars
(Fineman, 2003; Fineman, 2004; Fineman, 2005). This development has not been
without its strains, and currently a major fault line can be distinguished between
 Leadership and the ‘right to respect’ 65

essentialist and interpretative approaches to emotion in organisation. The former have

been predominantly occupied with an internal, even quantifiable perspective whereas the
latter pursue a more constructionist line of inquiry with a focus on the constructional
aspects, embeddedness and interplay inherent in emotion-work (Fineman, 2005). A
majority of studies have, however, had the individual as the primary unit of analysis,
which has also created a tendency within the essentialist approach to create metrics and
measurements (Zapf, 2002; Fineman, 2004).
As our focus in this paper is the social complex – such as groups and teams – the
most central development within the field has been the literature on collective emotions
and group behaviour that has developed throughout recent years (e.g. Barsade, 2002;
George, 2002). The study of group emotion has focused on the collective outcome of
affective influences on group behaviour, such as in the work of Smith and Crandell
(1984), which approaches group emotion from a sentience perspective. Similarly,
Barsade and Gibson (1998) analyse group emotion from a top-down and bottom-up
perspective, outlining the forces of group in shaping and exaggerating individual
emotional response, social norms prescribing and constraining emotional feeling, its
property as personal glue and group cohesion. Kelly and Barsade (2001), on their part,
analyse the fabric of group emotion, both with respect to the individual and to the
affective context of organisational norms and values and the group’s previous emotional
history. The importance of emotional contagion has also received considerable attention
as a central aspect of organisation behaviour and key determinant, especially for team
work (Kelly and Barsade, 2001; Pescosolido, 2002). The collectiveness and convergence
of moods in a group have been observed in several empirical studies covering a vast
array of professions and occupations such as nurses, accountants (Totterdell et al., 1998),
diverse project teams (Bartel and Saavedra, 2000) and, obviously, cricket players
(Totterdell, 2000).
This path of inquiry regarding the collective is exceptionally promising when it
comes to addressing the problematic of the ontology of individual emotion, and we
would argue in line with Barsade (2002) that an understanding of group cohesiveness
through emotional sentience and mood convergence is an important aspect both from an
interpretative as well as a normative leadership stance. However, this would require
understanding not only emotions per se, but also the ordering social context within which
they arise.
This is where we argue that an understanding of the way in which honour operates
might contribute to the literature on group emotions, and also raise some issues regarding
the notion of individualised emotions. As previously stated, honour in itself might not be
an emotion, in the sense these have been studied in the field. Instead, we are taking the
perspective that honour can be understood as a form of socially established emotional
super-structure that, when provoked, can give rise to individualised emotions such as a
feeling of pride or shame. Honour, then, would be a contextual nexus of social feelings
where inter-group expressions of emotion can be enacted. Thus, emotions such as shame
and pride – important denominators of inter-group formation and behaviour – play out in
a context of honour, which itself is not internally constituted (Bourdieu, 1965; Bourdieu,
1977). Our strive here is to introduce honour as a ‘fellow traveller’ of emotions in
organisation, and thus a potential contribution to theories of group emotions and
leadership. This paper, then, tries to introduce honour as a possible field of study within
the larger context of the existing literature on how emotions and emotional reactions
affect leadership and organisational life, in both functional and dysfunctional ways.
66 A. Rehn and M. Lindahl

3 Honour and the right to respect

Honour is well theorised in both sociology and anthropology (e.g. Bourdieu, 1990; Aase,
2002; Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers, 2005), but has rarely been used as a theoretical concept
in the study of management. Although contemporary references to honour often present
this as a somewhat archaic and possibly dangerous phenomenon, we will argue that it, in
fact, is present in most if not all organisational spheres and leadership contexts. Honour
may in fact be seen as a guiding force for any decision, as all decisions have the potential
to shame the manager. Simplifying the issue somewhat we can state that social actors
always exist in a moral context, and will exert themselves so as not to be shamed.
Such issues have of course been discussed through cultural concepts such as ‘face’,
‘masculinity’ or ‘identity’, so an additional concept might seem extraneous. However,
drawing upon the work of, for example, Frank Henderson Stewart (1994) we will in this
paper argue that honour, seen as the ‘right to respect’, can add to our understanding of
the backdrop or super-structure of emotional reactions.
As concepts, honour and shame are frequently used in the fields of anthropology,
particularly economic anthropology (Sahlins, 1963; Rehn, 2004), and in historical and
literary descriptions (Welsh, 2008), and convey quite clearly the strong social norms that
structured archaic societies. As an example, Pierre Bourdieu (1965, 1977) used the
concepts of h’urma (honour) and elbahadla (total humiliation) in order to explain Kabyle
society, something that arguably was the basis of his sociological theory. Similarly,
notions of honour and the ‘loss of face’ are used quite liberally in both scholarly and
layman’s discussions regarding international business and intercultural communication
(e.g. Tracy and Tracy, 1998), but these categories tend to disappear when the focus is
redirected to the habitat where organisation studies feel most at home – that of the
Western, modern organisation.
In its most basic form, honour can be described as a joint relation between an
individual and her/his social surroundings, so that honour is part of how an individual
perceives that others see her/his, particularly in a socio-moral perspective. Honour is not
something that exists solely ‘within’ an individual (although a social individual does
attain it in a way that makes it a part of her/his psyche, so that it can affect her/his even in
isolation), but is part of the culturally acquired set of orienting notions we often refer to
as an ethics. On the level of a group, this could be understood as an unfolding reflective
practice through which the members of a group continuously use the backdrop of the
others to constitute their identity – emotional contagion writ large and divorced from an
originating event. What distinguishes honour is that it seems to function as regulatory
sensation, a feeling of desired permanence in the ethical makeup of a person. Nothing
functional is meant by such a description, merely that honour exists as something that an
individual is normally not even aware of. Common ways of talking about honour do
however posit it as either possession that can be called into question (‘to be honourable’,
‘I have my honour’) or as something that one can lose in the face of others (‘I have been
dishonoured’, ‘he has no honour’), presenting it as a regulator of social behaviour. It is
noteworthy, however, that such claims always arise from either a challenge or perceived
possibility of a challenge to honour, so that talk of honour seems to be most frequent in
cases of intra-group tension and friction, when it comes to maintaining/regaining honour
in an individual’s life with a community, or as Bourdieu (1990, p.110) puts it: ‘The ethic
of honour bears down on each agent with the weight of all the other agents’. Honour can
 Leadership and the ‘right to respect’ 67

be approached as a general aspect of general sociality (e.g. Stewart, 1994; Berking, 1999,
pp.77–104), and manifests itself in a number of ways in the social network even when it
is not explicitly named – much as emotions or ethics might.
However, there is an important distinction to be made here. Honour, having strong
connotations to both moral and ethics, must be seen as something distinct from a general
discussion of ethical leadership (e.g. Brown et al., 2005; Brown and Treviño, 2006).
While it is undoubtedly true that the notion of honour sets up a moral grid of acceptable
and unacceptable behaviours, this is a situated and localised morality that is only valid
within a certain peer group – be it Melanesian ‘big men’ (Sahlins, 1963), American
outlaw bikers (cf. Aase, 2002) or, as in our illustration to come, Finnish project
engineers. The ethos of honour simultaneously establishes two set of rules: one
governing the rule of conduct between kinsmen and one governing the relationship with
others, with outsiders (Bourdieu, 1965). Following Bourdieu’s narration of the Kabyle
community, stealing or money lending is perceived as a dishonourable activity only when
the ‘victim’ is another kinsman but not if it concerns an ‘outsider’ (Bourdieu, 1965). In
similar vein, it is dishonourable not to protect a fellow kinsman from outsiders even if
s/he has behaved badly. In line with this, our illustration will highlight both cases of stern
disciplining stemming from perceived breaches of in-group behavioural codes, as well as
protecting the same miscreant in order to keep up the honour of the group. In other
words, honour presents itself to us partly as a tacit super-structure that is normally not
‘felt’, partly as a complex process of negotiated ethics which emphasises some relations
over others and which can thus lead to both morally upstanding and questionable,
dysfunctional behaviours.
Honour, as a social phenomenon rather than as an emotion, can in the case of an
individual be viewed as part of her/his social life-history, something often referred to as
her/his reputation – which in turn has been discussed at length in management and
leadership studies. The word reputation is interesting in itself, as it points to a view of the
social nexus where the talk of an individual is central, i.e. that honour is something
formed out of the way in which the community talks about a person. When this is
positive, and not tainted by excessive ambiguity, an individual is honourable and strives
to see to it that this remains the case. Barring radical changes in the community, the
entire discursive history of an individual can be said to be contained in the concept of
her/his honour/reputation.
This is also what Stewart (1994) addresses when he defines honour as a right, more
specifically as the right to respect. He states that honour cannot be understood merely as
an internal emotion, as this would mean that, for example, an insult such as calling
someone untrustworthy could not impugn a person’s honour as long as the person knew
it was not true. Instead, he says that an insult offends the feeling that we are entitled to
a certain amount of respect from a peer group. The issue is then not merely one
of whether an insult can be proven wrong, but the disrespect inherent in making
such statements. This is also what separates the issue of honour from the related
debate on reputation (e.g. King and Fine, 2000). Consequently, shame can be understood
as feeling one no longer has the right to be respected, which obviously entails a radical
re-interpretation of one’s moral identity. With such a perspective, protecting your honour
becomes a critical aspect of social behaviour and upholding a moral order. What makes
honour important is the fact that it has to be both internalised by the members of a culture
or a group, and that it exists only insofar as there are actors the right needs to be
protected for – it is important both to feel entitled to a right to respect, and for there to be
68 A. Rehn and M. Lindahl

people around who can afford you this right. This makes honour distinctly different from
internal emotions, as we obviously can feel, for example, sad or happy without there
being an external group this needs to be understood in relation to. To reiterate our earlier
point, if you are alone on an island you can be saddened or delighted, but you cannot be
shamed. For our purposes, it is important to note that no leader is an island.

4 Honour as lacuna in leadership studies

A key difficulty in establishing a theory of honour in conjunction with leadership lies in

the fleeting nature of the concept. Most treatments of the subject have opted not to give a
clear definition of honour, which obviously relegates the concept of being a general,
commonsensical explanation of a specific set of cultural behaviours. This has led to a
situation where honour is presented simply as another word for an individual’s internal
set of ethical values – and thus very close to something like a general emotion. In such a
perspective, it would seem an unnecessary complication to bring honour in, specifically
if one feels that calls to honour are archaic in nature, belonging to a virtue ethics that is
difficult to utilise for pragmatic ends (cf. MacIntyre, 1984).
In the context of management and leadership studies, the most surprising fact about
honour is the almost complete lack of this specific concept in the established literature.
While the term is sometimes mentioned in more popular books on leadership, and in
particular such that are inspired by military figures (e.g. Cloud, 2008; Taylor et al., 2009;
Williams, 2010), it has only rarely been utilised as a central concept in the theoretical
development of leadership studies (see, however, Muhr and Lemmergaard, 2009 on
sacrifice and leadership and Baxter and Margavio, 2000 on honour in economic
exchange). Obviously, one should not read too much into the way in which people have
not used the term ‘honour’, but this lack still seems odd, seeing as, for example, group
emotions and notions of respect and face have been discussed so vigorously in the
literature. If we look specifically to the work done on Leader-Member Exchange (LMX),
this is obviously a literature where respect has been discussed at length (e.g. Scandura
and Lankau, 1996; Liden and Maslyn, 1998), and where notions of reciprocity have been
brought in to address how these exchanges are ordered. But even though this literature
has built on anthropological insights (Sparrowe and Liden, 1997), it has chosen not to
address honour directly.
Looking to the work that has been published specifically on honour and organisation/
leadership we can however find a few interesting engagements. Hannah Meara (1974),
in her study of American meat cutters and Turkish butchers, notes that the concept of
honour is usually applied to high-status individuals and groups, but then normally by
people conferring this honour unto them (i.e. outsiders honouring a high-status group).
However, the concept can also be used inside a group to confer honour upon what could
from the outside be seen as a low-status occupation. In her study, she echoes Hughes’
(1971) exhortation to study processes through which individuals and groups make work
‘tolerable, or even glorious’, and observes how, for example, skills with knives or daring
in the face of danger become important aspects for how butchers and meat-cutters
construct their work identities. While fascinating, this study never does extend to the
issue of how these constructions affect the organisations in which the butchers work are
led and managed. Honour is here seen as an internal matter for a specific group, tied to
 Leadership and the ‘right to respect’ 69

the notion of professionalism but not necessarily connected to management. Something

similar can be seen in d’Iribarne (1994), where principles of honour are discussed in the
context of bureaucratisation.
In one of the very few papers directly addressing honour and management, Morrill
(1991) analyses how conflict management in a major American corporation was affected
by perceived codes of honour. Here, notions of codes of honour and designations such as
‘an honourable executive’ abound in the presentation, and are used to give the study
ethnographic depth. Morrill shows in a very convincing way how the managers in
‘Playco’ use statements such as ‘cheap shots’, ‘duels’ and ‘black hats’ versus ‘white hats’
when discussing corporate behaviours and uses this to infer their notions of honour. Still,
Morrill never addresses the theoretical issues inherent in studying honour, and ends up
merely stating that honour ceremonies and terminology can be utilised to create intra-
group stability in fraught situations. This might give us an indication of the problems
inherent in studying such a complex concept – while it is easy to outline and possible to
observe, it is exceedingly difficult to fit into a simplified model.
What is particularly important to note is that while honour has been discussed at
length in the social sciences and the humanities (e.g. Stewart, 1994; Peristiany and Pitt-
Rivers, 2005; Welsh, 2008), the papers above actually constitute the bulk of research
where honour has been explicitly addressed as an organisational issue and an issue for
management. Although honour has obviously been mentioned in studies of, for example,
identity and ethics, it still remains a largely understudied and badly understood concept
in the realm of leadership studies, though one could argue that the work done on
reputation (e.g. King and Fine, 2000) does have some connections to these issues.
In our perspective, as previously stated, honour is not an internal state. Rather, we see
that honour represents a tacit emotional super-structure in a group, one that orders and
regulates how respect is shown, valued and judged. Our argument, then, would be that
honour has not been sufficiently addressed in leadership studies because it has not been
conceptualised as a specifically social concept. Rather, it has been understood either as
an individual’s personal feeling about her or himself (and thus connected to emotions), a
form of identity formation internal to a group (Hughes, 1971), or as a cultural form to be
interrogated with anthropological theory (Morrill, 1991). Our perspective is more in line
with that of Stewart (1994) and Baxter and Margavio (2000), in which honour is a tacit
understanding of respect within a group up until the moment when it is highlighted and
an individual emerges out of the group – either by reinforcing norms that are seen as
virtuous or by breaching codes of conduct and calling respect into question.

5 The project team as men of honour – an illustration

Our illustration comes from an extensive ethnographic study of project deliveries in

cooperation with a major international producer of turn-key power plants. This means
that the power plant company delivers a complete, operational, electro-mechanical power
plant to the client, often within 12 months from a signed contract. The responsibility for
construction works (i.e. for erecting the plant) lies with a site team, which is situated at
the place of construction. Such a team consists of a site manager, responsible for the
whole construction phase and five to ten section managers who coordinate and manage
their specific technical areas. The actual work – casting, welding, carrying and so forth –
is performed by local contractors, supervised and coordinated by the site team.
70 A. Rehn and M. Lindahl

In the study where the material was generated, the research group of which we were
part studied the project deliveries of a major Finnish corporation in the power plant
business – projects normally lasting 6–12 months and having a delivery value of some
$100 millions. The projects were normally studied by placing a researcher on-site for
the duration of the project, making day-to-day observations of the project teams, and
supplementing their ethnographic diaries with both interviews with key informants,
limited surveys and material such as plans, work orders and internal reports. The research
group collected the empirical material in the period 1999–2003, and in total the empirical
database contained documentation of more than 20 project deliveries. The situations
discussed here were culled directly from this larger database as representative of ‘site
culture’, and as one of the authors had participated personally in these specific projects
and thus had intimate insight into the persons and personalities involved.
The site team generally consists of 10–15 men, depending on size or scope (we use
the generic term ‘men’, as no women were part of the teams we studied). The men often
have a background in the manufacturing company as electricians, mechanics or other
practical specialisations. Following the course of the company’s development over the
years, these men have moved from what was formerly pure equipment supply to a
position where they act as technical advisors to the client’s construction operations. In
parallel with the company starting to take more responsibility of the overall value chain,
i.e. going from equipment to system deliveries, the group of men we studied had become
the company’s own project management resources. Today, the company has a substantial
cadre of such ‘site men’, skilled craftsmen with substantial experience of both building
power plants and of living as expatriates under poor conditions.
The site team can best be described as a ‘tough bunch’ – at least this is how the group
prefers to describe itself. A rough description of a typical site team would be that of
a closely knit core of men in their mid-fifties, bolstered with a couple of young
apprentices, most of whom are fresh out of school. The senior crew members have spent
at least ten years out in the field, working abroad as supervisors of mechanical, electrical
or civil works in the company’s projects. Even though everyone does not know everyone
else, most will be known to each other by word of mouth. There is a strong shared
association in the groups of being ‘site people’, of being part of a group that is sent into
the field to make things happen, to act in tough situations. Another commonly shared
feeling in the groups is a distinct antagonism towards the home office, any form of
white-collar management and the so-called ‘technical tourists’ (members of project
management team) who visit the sites occasionally for meetings and design reviews. This
‘us versus them’ is obviously a common phenomenon in group behaviour (e.g. Adorno
et al., 1950; Sherif, 1966; Brown, 1995), but in our analysis this also created a basis for
honour as a perceived ‘right to respect’ (Stewart, 1994) in the groups. The ‘technical
tourists’ (a term in widespread use on the sites) were seen as not worthy of as much
respect as proper ‘site people’ as they had not undergone the same hardships, but at the
same time their presence on the site was seen as a threat to the respect owed to the group,
as the ‘tourists’ often were hierarchically superior.
The living and working conditions for the site teams are quite hard. Raising a power
plant out of the ground in ten months means long working hours in a tropical climate.
Since the plants are seldom built in urban areas, the general living conditions and
potential leisure activities are quite limited. Given the situation, the demography of the
site team, and the celebrated ‘roughneck’ culture, the site groups often indulged in hard
drinking, and frequenting prostitutes or ‘site girlfriends’ was seen as a normal, everyday
 Leadership and the ‘right to respect’ 71

affair. The moral codes adopted on site are thus coloured by the local conditions and the
nature of expatriate life. At the same time, the site groups have adopted strong moral codes
regarding what constitutes ‘good work’, which emphasises technical excellence under
adverse conditions, pride in one’s work, and ‘getting it done’ (cf. Fine, 1996). The latter
is particularly important, as the groups are focused on meeting often very challenging
deadlines, and take great pride in doing so.
In the following, we address two specific, connected stories from our cases as
examples of how honour appears in this context. We will then discuss how the study of
honour could enhance our understanding of leadership.

5.1 Mr Pöntinen’s house

One Sunday morning on a construction site outside a small village in southern India one
of the authors had the privilege to accompany Mr Heikki Pöntinen,1 Section Manager for
mechanical installations, on a routine tour of the premises. He had previously met
Mr Pöntinen in another project in Central America. In this project, Pöntinen had been
responsible for the installations of the engine, including associated areas such as office
and storage spaces. In the Indian project, he was in charge of mechanical installations,
but had recently also been made responsible for the remaining construction of the engine
hall. The reason for this was that the person previously in charge of this, Mr Dahlbäck,
had left the project. Pöntinen was visibly annoyed when walking around the premises.
One reason for this was that Dahlbäck had left him with a long list of necessary
corrections and re-work that was needed on the house, and it was Pöntinen’s firm opinion
that Dahlbäck should have addressed these items before he left the site – as having such a
long list of corrections was seen as shameful. This, according to Pöntinen, only showed
that Dahlbäck had done a bad job.
The author and Mr Pöntinen spent the morning inspecting damages and poor work on
the building. Bolts were missing here and there, some plates were torn and/or buckled,
the distance between some platforms deviated slightly, and so forth. For a layman most
of these ‘errors’ would seem insignificant and mostly of a cosmetic nature. However,
Pöntinen did not share such a view. He stated, quite loudly, that he would be ‘ashamed of
himself’ if he had been the originator of such a construction. The conversation regularly
came back to Pöntinen asking the author’s opinion of this building in comparison to the
one in Central America. Having received reassuring comments about the magnificence of
the South American building Pöntinen was visibly pleased and frequently underlined the
fact that he’d been the one to build it and in record time as well. In parallel with the
recurring theme of the building in India being a poorly built Pöntinen expressed his great
passion for building power plants, the finest and the fastest in the company. It was only
‘a shame’ that he had not been permitted to be in charge of this building from the start
but only to come in and mop up somebody else’s poor craftsmanship.
Strong emotions coupled with the idea of excellence in performance – like the one
depicted earlier – are common and repeating within the cases. In many aspects we could
trace a distinct ‘esprit d’corps’ in the cases, one characterised by strong calls to honour
and pride in one’s work. This can for instance be seen in the notions of good versus poor
work within the groups, but also in relation to what could be termed ‘proper conduct’.
Mr Pöntinen’s professional journey is an interesting one in itself. In the general site team
community, he is well known and highly respected – particularly after being wounded in
action while in Africa. During a hostile attack of guerrilla forces on the power plant area
72 A. Rehn and M. Lindahl

under construction, Pöntinen single-handedly managed to rescue the satellite antenna

from the office barracks and hide in a nearby swamp for several hours despite getting
wounded by a stray bullet. In other words, he had endured physical harm in order to
ensure that the project could still be ‘done’, and had thus shown himself to be a man of
honour.
However, despite this heroic status in general, Mr Pöntinen actually was in a sort of
diaspora when interviewed. He usually operated as a site-team member in the company’s
South and Central American projects, but had now been moved to India. This was not
due to having done a bad job in the Americas, but rather for having made another
honour-related point. As previously stated, it is not unheard of among site people to have
various kinds of affairs while on assignment, and this normally includes using the
services of local prostitutes. During a project in South America, Mr Pöntinen had,
however, observed that the site manager had engaged with prostitutes who in Pöntinen’s
view were too young. This, for him, was not only morally wrong, but dishonoured the
entire group and thus constituted a breach of conduct that even put his own right to
respect into question (cf. Cohen et al., 1996). Consequently, he publicly berated and
shamed the site manager, and continued by beating him up, breaking his nose. As the
company noted the honour code underlying this, he was not fired, but instead moved
to India.
What the story of Mr Pöntinen shows is how notions such as shame, pride and honour
work to create a framework for the way in which a specific individual forms a work
identity but also a notion of what kind of behaviours build or threaten respect. For
Mr Pöntinen the fact that ‘his house’ in South America was superior to the house he’d
been put in charge of in India showed that he was indeed entitled to the right to respect,
while he suggested that this might not be the case with Mr Dahlbäck. Similarly, the
behaviour of the site manager in South America was a threat to his perceived right to
respect, and had to be met with violence (cf. Cohen et al., 1996).

5.2 Toni the purchaser

Our second story is about Toni, a white-collar engineer in his thirties from the purchasing
department who had volunteered to work at a site in a form of job rotation. Toni had been
assigned the vague title of project assistant and was to act as a general resource for the
project manager in particular and the site team in general. He thus had all the makings of
being seen as a ‘technical tourist’. What is interesting here is that he not only managed to
stay in the project to its completion, but that he also became accepted as a genuine ‘site
member’. He even benefited from the protection of the site team when his later doings
came under question by top management. Being seen as a ‘real’ site-group member is
by no means self-evident for someone like Toni. A young white-collar man from
headquarters with an academic degree but no practical knowledge of either building
power plants or of living in the field should have made him appear an outsider, and thus
not covered by the honour codes of the group.
However, from the very beginning Toni fully and wholeheartedly bought into the
group’s preferred leisure activities – drinking and whoring. Still, this should by no means
have been enough to achieve the site team’s approval. ‘Genuine’ site personnel with a
similar taste for extracurricular activities had earlier been expelled from the team and
sent home due to poor performance. In comparison, Toni was seen as being capable of
both serious work and serious hell raising. Even though he was originally looked upon
 Leadership and the ‘right to respect’ 73

with suspicion, Toni had over time started to receive positive approval for his skills as a
purchaser at site. He was seen as a real hardliner towards the different vendors and
managed to negotiate several economically beneficial contracts. He was also seen as
someone who was not there for a vacation – the usual comment about ‘technical tourists’.
His working hours were as long as anybody else’s and it was obvious that he tried hard,
regardless of whether it concerned project administration, purchasing or drinking.
However, Toni consequently and on several occasions managed to mess things up.
One of these occasions was when Toni got appointed acting site manager. The site
manager Jukka had to go on a two-day trip in order to renew his visa. Things were
running smoothly and the weekend was coming up, so Jukka put Toni in charge. Toni
took his new responsibilities seriously. He decided it would be a good time to take the
client’s representative out to dinner which he, accompanied by the rest of the site team,
did later in the afternoon. However, after a generous pizza dinner and a beauty contest
[sic], Toni managed to get into somewhat difficult argument with the client’s
representative, a Mr Sosa. Toni, who had gotten considerably intoxicated during the
evening had somehow managed to lose his wallet. In Toni’s eyes, the main suspect was
Mr Sosa, who now found himself accused by the host to have stolen the wallet. Some
senior members of the site team managed to divert the attention so that direct hostilities
could be avoided and took Toni home. Here, we have a case where the site group needs
to consider a number of issues. On the one hand, Toni’s behaviour could be seen as
dishonourable – insulting a client is rarely a good idea – but on the other hand the client
is an ‘outsider’ and thus the internal honour of the group might necessitate that one
protects Toni despite his misbehaviour.
Unfortunately, the following day when Toni had locked himself into the site
manager’s office to nurse his hangover, the main bulk of materials arrived by truck to the
site. Such delivery requires precise coordination regarding where materials are to be
unloaded in the warehouse. After a couple of hours a member of the site team observed
that no one was managing the unloading process, and that this had now turned into a
considerable mess. A couple of senior site team supervisors decided that this was cause
for having a serious discussion with Toni regarding how things were supposed to be
done, what was expected of a professional team member and what would happen if one
did not excel in ones work, i.e. be sent home. In other words, getting drunk and
threatening the client was not enough for the group to lose respect for Toni, but not
taking care of an unloading sent a signal that Toni did not take pride in his work and thus
might not be worthy of the respect the group had shown him the night before (cf.
Rodriguez Mosquera et al., 2000).
The previous story is of course a retelling of a specific, somewhat tragicomical, event
and one could assume that Toni got his act together and thus managed to prove himself in
the eyes of his senior colleagues. However, the basic script of these incidents was
actually a recurring phenomenon. It was not always the case that Toni was drunk and
embarrassed himself and others or that the warehouse site was always a mess. However,
more than once the senior site team had ‘a serious talk’ with Toni, discussing what was
acceptable behaviour and how easy it would be for them to send him home if he did not
perform. Still Toni managed to stay in. In fact, when Toni finally returned to the home
office, the remaining site team described him and his work in highly positive and
respectful terms.
74 A. Rehn and M. Lindahl

Whereas the case with Mr Pöntinen shows how important the issue of retaining and
manifesting honour can be on an individual level, the case with Toni the Purchaser shows
how honour once gained can in fact be quite enduring. Toni was ‘one of the guys’, and
had proved himself by not being a ‘technical tourist’. Once included in the group, he had
won the right to respect and not even multiple cases of being drunk at work, bungling
matters or failing were enough to deprive him of this.
Taken together, the two stories of Mr Pöntinen and Toni the Purchaser thus indicate
that rather than seeing honour as merely an internalised emotion or an element of cultural
cohesion, we have to understand it as a multifaceted phenomenon that can create both
functional effects and dysfunctional ones. To understand honour thus requires that
we move away from simplified explanations of how people in organisations deal in
emotionally fraught situations, and instead look towards the complexities that social
feelings can introduce into organisational life.

6 Discussion

In much of leadership theory there exists an underlying and implicit assumption that
‘true’ leaders will garner respect more or less automatically (e.g. George, 2003). Theories
of authentic leadership (George, 2003) and transformational leadership (Bass, 1990;
Avolio et al., 2004) tend to portray the leader as a person with a defined ‘core’, an
internal state that results in a series of behaviours that then can be interpreted and
modified through social and cultural forces. Similarly, theorisations of emotion in
organisation have had a tendency to see the social and the cultural aspects of emotion as
critical but post hoc, i.e. that emotional states are internal but that we learn ways to
mediate and modify these to adapt to cultural norms. The matter of honour problematises
this notion of internal stability, as it can only exist as a social phenomenon – while you
can feel afraid without others, you cannot feel shame without the potential Other – and as
it positions the leader into a set of tacit emotional orderings that emphasises the manner
in which respect is negotiated in a group (cf. Pescosolido, 2002). Honour is not
experienced as an emotion, but rather as a form of tacit group assumptions that
emphasises the role of how a collective notion of acceptable behaviour is constructed
(Bartel and Saavedra, 2000), so that the ‘honourable leader’ is not so thanks to any
internal state but thanks to an ongoing negotiation of what constitutes respect in a
leadership situation (cf. Sparrowe and Liden, 1997).
What our perspective wishes to bring in to this discussion is an alternate theorisation
of respect and thus honour – and people’s feelings about the respect they offer others and
others offer them. Referring back to our discussions, we would postulate that most
leaders in fact feel that respect is not only something you earn, but something that you
subsequently have a right to (even though they might not formulate it in this manner),
and are prepared to spend quite a lot of energy to protect this right. This would involve
both engaging in behaviours that show to their environment that they are worthy of such
respect and a strive not be shamed and thereby lose honour.
Looking to our cases, we can see that Mr Pöntinen took his honour very seriously,
taking pride in having built what he felt was a house worthy of respect and being
prepared to face expulsion and firing rather than accepting that a superior behaved in a
way that he felt was dishonourable – and in connection lose face to the men he himself
led. This is clearly a case of a man protecting his right to respect, both by pointing out
 Leadership and the ‘right to respect’ 75

what he would never do and by fighting for what he felt was honourable conduct. Our
other case, that of Toni, shows how a manager, once accepted into a group with distinct
honour codes, can remain protected by the group even when behaving in a dysfunctional
manner. Respect once won can through this become an insulating phenomenon, showcasing
the two sides of honour. On the one hand, the side that makes people stand up for
their principles (Meara, 1974), on the other, the side that can reinforce bad behaviour
(Cohen et al., 1996).
Our perspective in this paper has been to see these matters as a case of social feelings,
i.e. as a set of negotiated and embedded feelings that exist primarily in a social context.
Rather than seeing our cases as building on internal emotions, we have tried to argue that
the occurrences in them stem from socially mediated feelings that are different from
internal emotions mediated through cultural repertoires – and thus a problematisation of
the stance of Fineman (2005) where there is an implicit assumptions that emotions are
based in the individual but made meaningful through culture. In our twist, we would
argue that honour is a super-structure for a set of social feelings that are based in culture
and made meaningful through individuals and their social challenges. Such a stance
could arguable extend some of the notions already present in theories of leader-
membership exchange (Schriesheim et al., 1999), and potentially create more linkages
between anthropological theory and leadership dito (such as those present in, for
example, Sparrowe and Liden, 1997).
For practising leaders, the important thing is to acknowledge that honour is an
important aspect in how, for example, underlings interpret their situation, particularly in
emotionally fraught situations – and why the desire to be ‘a man of honour’ may well
cause dysfunctional behaviour. Similarly, the important thing for researchers is to
acknowledge that honour exists in management and organisation, and that both leaders
and followers are normally prepared to go very far to protect what they see as a right to
respect. This can lead to both functional and dysfunctional reactions, but in both cases
the researcher needs to be aware of the complex set of social feelings that can drive such.
Succinctly put, we have to respect the right to respect.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr Sverre Spoelstra for his valuable comments on the
‘emotionality’ of honour.

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Note
1 All names have been changed throughout.