Dynamic Ethical Reciprocity: Reuniting Psychology, Ethics, and Phenomenology in Leadership and Followership Theory

Leadership scholarship has remained theoretically fragmented, often separating ethical intention, psychological interpretation, and phenomenological experience into distinct analytical silos. This article introduces Dynamic Ethical Reciprocity, a unified theoretical framework that positions leadership and followership as reciprocal moral acts shaped by intention, information flow, perceptual meaning-making, and lived organizational experience. The model reframes organizational breakdowns not as performance deficits but as ethical ruptures within relational systems. Dynamic Ethical Reciprocity explains how leadership meaning is co-created through morally charged interaction loops and offers a corrective to existing theories that privilege traits, behaviors, or situational variables over relational consciousness.