John Fisher Visits St. John Fisher

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. Driving from Buffalo to New York City in 1990, after appearing in A Moon for the Misbegotten at the former\u27s Studio Arena Theatre, I passed through Rochester and remember thinking what a lovely city it looked like and how unlikely it was that I would ever have occasion to re-visit it. I\u27m very glad to say I was wrong

Authentic Leadership and Leadership Ethics: Proposing A New Perspective

Authentic leadership is considered a new field of leadership research. Its formative status makes it possible to attract unique commentary and re-examination. Based on a comparison between authentic leadership and leadership ethics and focusing on the theoretical perspective of authentic leadership, this essay argues for a new perspective of authentic leadership. Consistencies resulting from the comparison serve to reinforce this essay’s central argument, namely, that just as ethics is central to all forms leadership, the main perspectives and components of authentic leadership as well as factors that influence it are also central to the various leadership approaches. In other words, the centrality of ethics to leadership seems consistent with the centrality of authenticity to leadership. Therefore, rather than continue research in authentic leadership as a unique leadership approach, this essay recommends research in concepts such as authentic transformational leadership, authentic servant leadership, authentic team leadership, authentic transactional leadership, among other forms of leadership. The essay concludes with a study recommendation, sampling some research questions and a hypothesis

Happiness, Social Preferences and Economic Policy

Two recent research branches have called into question the hypothesis that the economic subject is rational and egoist, that is to say, that his/her sole objective is to maximize his/her own personal material interests. In the first place, the literature on the so-called happiness paradox has seriously put in question the given, widely diffused not only in the doctrine but also in the common perception, that a higher level of material welfare necessarily leads to a greater level of personal well being or happiness, on an individual level but even more so on a collective one. In the second place, experimental economics has produced a wealth of results that, vice versa, confirm something that the common sense and the personal observation of many had already suspected: economic subjects do not all and not always pursue exclusively the maximization of their own personal interests. This work critically discusses these two approaches and analyzes their interesting implications in economic policy

Competition for power and altruism

The paper analyzes the trade-off between power and altruism by using an experimental framework which involved a group of experimental agents, undergraduate students of the University of Siena. The results show that the introduction into the experimental structure of a tournament for the power appreciably altered the behaviour of agents. More specifically the degree of altruism, measured by the dictator offers, significantly decreased when the agents were able to trade altruism for power. The results were more clear-cut and robust in the case of the dictator game, but also in the case of the ultimatum game the introduction of the tournament for power altered the behavior of subjects. A significant gender effect emergedAltruism, Dictator game, Ultimatum game, Hierarchy

Power, hierarchy and social preferences

I ran an experiment in order to evaluate the relationship, if any, between power, or the search for power, and the degree of altruism. In particular I experimentally tested whether an organization structured in a strictly hierarchical way was able to reduce the degree of altruism of a group of experimental subjects. The subjects were divided into groups and played a series of dictator and ultimatum games with the members of other groups; for each experimental euro that they earned, the experimenter assigned half of it to the group. Two different settings were analyzed according to how this group surplus was distributed among group members. In the control setting (treatment A) the group surplus was distributed equally among group members, while in the power setting (treatment B) there was a ranking of the earnings in the group, and the subject who earned the higher sum was given the power to decide the distribution scheme of the group different from her own. It was found that the introduction of a hierarchical structure generated a significant decrease in the rate of altruism, measured in terms of the allocation given to the receiver in the dictator game. In this case the tournament among group members for leadership and the competition for power was a very strong means to induce behaviour more in line with the classical assumption of economics. A remarkable gender effect emerges, suggesting that women seem less attracted and trapped by competition for power.Altruism, Dictator game, Ultimatum game, Hierarchy