TITLE:
How Corporate Leadership Misleads Workers
AUTHORS:
Ross A. Jackson, Brian L. Heath
KEYWORDS:
Alienation, Capitalism, Critique, Ideology, Management, Revolution, Solidarity
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Business and Management,
Vol.13 No.4,
July
17,
2025
ABSTRACT: Leadership is a complex phenomenon. Notwithstanding legitimate perspectives like servant, collaborative, and distributed leadership, the enactment of corporate leadership most often entails the confluence of position, power, and authority. Within that context, corporate executives under capitalism have unique, formal abilities to direct the actions of subordinates. Bifurcating that authority, corporate executives provide leadership in terms of both the strategic direction of the organization (i.e., where an organization is going) and the organizational incentive structure (i.e., how workers are directed to advance and what workers can expect to obtain through work). In terms of the strategic direction of firms, corporate leadership can be relatively adroit at defining an emergent and generative future. In terms of the incentive structure, corporate leadership more frequently than not misleads workers into pursuing individual advancement through promotion rather than the collective improvement of working conditions for all. This critical analysis examined the structure and ideology of capitalism and its enactment and propagation by corporate leadership, discovering that organizational workers find themselves structurally forsaken, cajoled into taking long shots, and ultimately misled. Through the process, the obfuscated ideology residing at the core of worker alienation under capitalism was revealed, providing a basis for solidarity and revolutionary action.