Pure Leadership Model: A Framework for Leaders Desiring to Lead with an Upright Heart

Contemporary organisations face intensifying demands for value-driven decision-making, ethical consistency, and service-oriented leadership. These demands underscore the need for frameworks that integrate character formation with organisational performance. In response to these challenges, the Pure Leadership Model conceptualises leadership as a virtue-centred system in which specific virtues function as the mediating link between leadership styles and core organisational values. The model positions the virtues of meekness, compassion, courage, faithfulness, sincerity, and prudence as central mechanisms through which servant, ethical, and authentic leadership translate into the organisational values of service, accountability, and integrity. Through this virtuous mediation, the model ultimately promotes organisational purity which is the organisation’s steadfast adherence to a single institutional logic or core identity despite external pressures. Drawing on recent from contemporary research on virtue-based leadership and literature on servant, ethical, and authentic leadership, this paper develops an integrated conceptual framework for leadership practice, theoretical advancement, and future empirical testing. The Pure Leadership Model contributes to leadership studies by offering a systematic, virtue-oriented approach that strengthens ethical coherence to enhances organisational purity.