Reflexive Love in Leadership

Research on love in leadership highlights its importance across spiritual, servant, and humanistic traditions, emphasizing compassion, dignity, and flourishing. However, existing work largely treats love as a positive virtue, with limited attention to its tensions in practice. This paper develops a paradoxical framework of love in leadership, demonstrating how its enactment within organizational contexts simultaneously enables and constrains leadership processes.Drawing on paradox theory, we identify three interrelated tensions—care versus control, inclusion versus exclusion, and empowerment versus dependency—that explain how expressions of love generate both beneficial and unintended outcomes. We introduce the concept of reflexive love, defined as leaders’ capacity to recognize and navigate these tensions in context. Rather than viewing love as inherently problematic, we argue that its dual effects emerge through its enactment within relational and structural conditions.By conceptualizing love as an enacted and paradoxical process, this paper extends paradox theory into relational and affective domains and offers a mid-range framework with testable propositions. Overall, the study contributes to leadership research by reframing love as a context-dependent resource and by providing a structured explanation of how its enabling and constraining effects arise in organizational life.

Cognitive reframing · Philosophy of love · Reflexivity · Relational theory · Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior · Management and Organizational Studies · Workplace Spirituality and Leadership