http://www.thejournalofbusiness.org/index.php/site 76 Moral Implications of Leadership - Transformative Insights Feng Xu 1 , Cam Caldwell 2 , Verl Anderson 3 ABSTRACT In this paper we examine the correlations between Lawrence Kohlberg’s six stages of morality and Transformative Leadership, a new morally-based approach to leadership. Using survey of students, faculty members, and staffs at a South Florida private university we present evidence that there is a clear relationship between an individual’s self-described leadership perspectives and the stages of Kohlberg’s moral development model. Our paper provides five significant contributions to the literature about leadership and its moral role and enables scholars and practitioners to understand more completely the relationships between leadership and moral behavior. Keywords: Commitment, Kohlberg’s six-stage moral development, morality, transformative leadership. Available Online: 16-04-2016. This is an open access article under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, 2016. 1.0 INTRODUCTION To earn the trust of followers, leaders must demonstrate a highly moral commitment to the welfare of others if they wish to retain trust (Cameron, 2011). Despite the inherent logic in such a statement, the scholarly literature offers little empirical evidence about the relationship between a leader’s self- perspective about their leadership philosophy and the moral implications of that philosophy. Recently, Caldwell and colleagues (Caldwell, et al., 2012) introduced a new model of Dztransformative leadershipdz that focuses on the duties owed by leaders, incorporating ethical components of six highly regarded leadership perspectives. Exploring the relationships between the duties of leadership and their moral focus can improve scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of the relationships between leadership and leaders’ moral duties to others (cf. Hosmer, 2011). The purpose of this paper is to identify how the leadership perspectives of transformative leadership relate to Kohlberg’s ȋ11Ȍ six stages of moral development. We explain Kohlberg’s moral development model and the ethical focus of the perspectives of transformative leadership, presenting seven hypotheses about the relationship between transformative leadership and the Kohlberg model. After 1 School of Business Administration, Georgia Southwestern State University, Americus, GA 31709, E-mail: feng.xu@gsw.edu 2 School of Business and Communications, Dixie State University, St. George, UT 84770., E-mail: cam.caldwell@dixie.edu 3 School of Business and Communications, Dixie State University, St. George, UT 84770. E-mail: verl@dixie.edu International Journal of Business and Social Research Volume 06, Issue 03, 2016