The impact of Buddhist business leadership on employee engagement in the UK

The main aim of this proposal is to provide a meaningful alternative to some of the problems and limitations concerning the basic assumptions behind the most influential ethical theories informing business ethics in the West; notably deontology, developed by Kant and consequentialism, with Bentham and J.S. Mill as the major theorists . In fact, both approaches have been charged to be inadequate to address systemic issues such as social inequality (Tanzler et al. 2012), environmental issues (Persson 2009) and individual loss of meaning (Seidman 1983) of which the Neo-liberal West is author as well as recipient, because of their overemphasis on individual rationality and the assumption that moral judgements are somehow derivable, like deductible math problems (Hamington and Sander-Staudt 2011, p. ix) . Starting from the conception of individuals as moral being qua rational beings, this emphasis looks at moral dilemmas from the stance of the highest principles and takes rights and obligations as a means of establishing relationships (Sevenhuijsen 2000, p. 10), resulting in situations where someone's legitimate needs will be restricted because of higher moral principles or because their needs have been sacrificed for the greater good. In addition, because of the excessive egotistical stance, the Western ethical standpoint has been deemed as partly responsible for the environmental crisis, as it devalues animals, plants and ecosystems (Malachowski 2001, p.46). The proposed research intends to provide an alternative way of thinking about business ethics in the West taking as a starting point the close link between the care ethics, and the concept of compassionate leadership, which is based on the Buddhist core principle of compassion. The objective is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the extent to which compassionate leadership is practised in a Western context and what is the impact on stakeholders such as employees and civil society organisations.