Business today is conducted within societies facing complex global challenges and unprecedented demands for effective, ethical, and excellent business leadership that proactively manages its societal impacts. Integrating economic success with service of the common good requires a sound, shared understanding of “positive” executive business leadership to guide executive selection, education and development, and practice. This thesis formulates and theoretically grounds a general theory of positive executive business leadership. Integrative Executive Leadership (“IEL”) addresses the individual, pairs/groups/teams, organizational, and societal levels of business. Within these contexts, IEL exercises positive integrative agency through multi-stakeholder professional stewardship, integrated performance management, and living codes of ethics. This requires the practice of five mutually-reinforcing positive behavioural repertoires: contemplative self-leadership, functional-relational facilitative leadership, full range managerial-leadership, visionary strategic leadership, and transforming-developmental leadership. These are reinforced by five positive philosophies or styles of leadership: authentic, moral, spiritual, servant, and wise leadership. Consequently, IEL is predicated upon essential competencies, attainments, and positive dispositions. Especially, IEL requires the cultivation of positive psychological states, traits, and virtues, eudaimonic character, postautonomous levels of ego development, psychological complexity, integrative consciousness and flow. In addition to promoting intrinsic morality, these farther reaches of human nature contribute to effective and excellent leadership performance. Integrative Executive Leaders do well by doing good. IEL was developed through multiparadigm theory-building, adopting a pragmatic epistemology, and employing a transdisciplinary, positive scholarship approach to integrate the findings from a broad range of qualitative and quantitative research from the humanities and the social sciences. IEL theory articulates important theoretical relationships derived from: leading insights from management and organization theory; salient research findings from the social sciences and the humanities; insights from positive psychology, positive organizational behaviour, positive organizational scholarship, constructive developmental psychology, transpersonal psychology, and integrated empirical ethics; interpretive analyses of the biographies of great world leaders; and, a rich case study of an extraordinary executive business leader. Accordingly, IEL is advanced as an emergent theory with both theoretical grounding and empirical reference. The path forward requires further transdisciplinary, multiparadigm, multi-method research to further develop and refine IEL and establish it as a grounded theory of positive executive business leadership.

Business today is conducted within societies facing complex global challenges and unprecedented demands for effective, ethical, and excellent business leadership that proactively manages its societal impacts. Integrating economic success with service of the common good requires a sound, shared understanding of “positive” executive business leadership to guide executive selection, education and development, and practice. This thesis formulates and theoretically grounds a general theory of positive executive business leadership. Integrative Executive Leadership (“IEL”) addresses the individual, pairs/groups/teams, organizational, and societal levels of business. Within these contexts, IEL exercises positive integrative agency through multi-stakeholder professional stewardship, integrated performance management, and living codes of ethics. This requires the practice of five mutually-reinforcing positive behavioural repertoires: contemplative self-leadership, functional-relational facilitative leadership, full range managerial-leadership, visionary strategic leadership, and transforming-developmental leadership. These are reinforced by five positive philosophies or styles of leadership: authentic, moral, spiritual, servant, and wise leadership. Consequently, IEL is predicated upon essential competencies, attainments, and positive dispositions. Especially, IEL requires the cultivation of positive psychological states, traits, and virtues, eudaimonic character, postautonomous levels of ego development, psychological complexity, integrative consciousness and flow. In addition to promoting intrinsic morality, these farther reaches of human nature contribute to effective and excellent leadership performance. Integrative Executive Leaders do well by doing good. IEL was developed through multiparadigm theory-building, adopting a pragmatic epistemology, and employing a transdisciplinary, positive scholarship approach to integrate the findings from a broad range of qualitative and quantitative research from the humanities and the social sciences. IEL theory articulates important theoretical relationships derived from: leading insights from management and organization theory; salient research findings from the social sciences and the humanities; insights from positive psychology, positive organizational behaviour, positive organizational scholarship, constructive developmental psychology, transpersonal psychology, and integrated empirical ethics; interpretive analyses of the biographies of great world leaders; and, a rich case study of an extraordinary executive business leader. Accordingly, IEL is advanced as an emergent theory with both theoretical grounding and empirical reference. The path forward requires further transdisciplinary, multiparadigm, multi-method research to further develop and refine IEL and establish it as a grounded theory of positive executive business leadership.