Moral Leadership Matters More Now Than Ever

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Organisations cannot function without formal moral authority. Organisations really work when formal authority is supported by moral leadership. In the presence of moral authority trust is build which inspires and creates meaningful and lasting stakeholder relationships into the future. Now, one may wonder as to whether the leadership at SAA never spotted the challenges the institution was faced with as they kept piling up.

The continued government interference has long impacted on the performance of SAA. Wasserman (2020) references that the once lucrative route that SAA had between Mumbai and Johannesburg was relinquished to a competitor with strong government links, the Indian airline Jet Airways. In its harrowing relationship with the finance ministry, the government was unrelenting to stick its oar in. When the then finance minister refused to comply with the many undesirable government interference and demanded that SAA’s board be replaced, he was subsequently eventually axed. This, therefore, raises the issue of formal moral leadership at the national carrier , or the lack thereof.

SAA has dominated headlines with scathing remarks on the dispensed morality in authority from its management and leadership. It is not rocket science that managers that demonstrate higher levels of moral leadership have stronger connections with their internal and external environment, such as employees, society, investors, as well as prospective employers.

Based on the Future Forces Theory (FTI 2020), it is evident that in the case of SAA, government interference  became a macro source of disruption. The Future Forces Theory explains how disruption usually stems from influential sources of macro change. It is equally important that we also place government in the context of leadership as a driver influencing the management within SAA. The leadership was driven by challenges in implementing organisational change and the changes in investor focus. Leaders no longer scale shareholder value without scaling morality values. Thus, some of SAA's executive members were appointed but gave up as soon as they found the emergency exit doors, citing a lack of morality in government support. And this begs the question of morality in authority.

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