Responsible Leadership

Nicola Pless, Thomas Maak, Nicola Pless, Thomas Maak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367321000
• eBook ISBN: 9781000513851
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The second edition of Responsible Leadership offers orienting knowledge on how to lead in a world of contested values—a world where leadership work extends beyond leaders and direct reports to a whole range of stakeholders inside and outside an organization.

The new edition comes at a time where leaders face growing expectations to do better, and more, and where leadership challenges such as the ethical tragedy of climate change and global pandemics highlight the urgency of collective action. Updated and significantly extended, the second edition of this much acclaimed volume assembles leading scholars and practitioners in the field. It includes new chapters on inclusive leadership, the study of responsible leadership, the purpose of organizations, authenticity and values, virtuous leadership, irresponsible leadership, the paradoxical nature of responsible leadership, responsible leadership in context and in Asia, artistic expression to enable responsible leadership, responsible leadership measurement, and new directions for responsible leadership.

This volume offers rich and functional insights into the concept and practice of responsible leadership. It will appeal to academics and practitioners alike with a wide array of perspectives grounded in pioneering scholarship and best practice.

1 Introduction The ongoing quest for responsible leadership in business

Thomas Maak and Nicola M. Pless

DOI: 10.4324/b22741-1

This book is about leadership and responsibility in business. While most of us would probably consider one as inseparable from the other, recurring corporate scandals since the start of the millennium suggest otherwise. The first edition of this volume, published in 2005, was in part a response to high-profile cases of management failure and leadership misconduct such as Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat. Since then, the world has experienced a global financial crisis, widespread moral failure of banks, “Dieselgate,” and the rise of a mostly unregulated digital capitalism, all of which seem to suggest that, 15 years later, responsible leadership is still in short supply and much needed.

Indeed, there is growing awareness, including at the upper echelon of organizations, that responsible leadership is one of the most pressing issues in the business world. However, it is still also one of the least understood. At the same time, it is fair to say that the first edition of this volume set the stage for what has become a research domain in its own right: the study of and theorizing on responsible leadership in a world of contested values—a world where leadership work extends beyond the narrow dyad of leaders and direct reports to a whole range of stakeholders inside and outside an organization. A world where stakeholders expect leaders not only to do better, but also to do more—to commit their organization to sustainable futures, to have a purpose that goes beyond shareholder value, and to share some political responsibility at home and abroad. If anything, the global COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these expectations by shedding light on global connectedness, risk, and responsibility—and the role of organizations in the realm of global shared responsibility.

In light of the growing interest in responsible leadership, the increased complexity of leadership, and the persisting deficiencies in both research and practice, we felt that it was time to update, revise, and extend this volume. In doing so, we wanted to not only maintain the spirit of the first edition but also incorporate new and emerging vistas by distinguished colleagues such that this volume can serve as inspiration and provide “orienting knowledge” for years to come. The result is a volume that is both more focused and more comprehensive.

The responsible leadership gap remains and its root causes have not changed much since the publication of the first edition of this book. There still seems to be an assumption that those who take on a leadership position will somehow develop, or have, a heightened sense of responsibility, and thus act more responsibly once they are in a leadership position, and that therefore no explicit guidance is needed and not much thought must be given to responsible leadership. If anything, the opposite is true: instead of an elevated sense of responsibility (for others, the organization, and to society), one cannot help but think that the corrosive effects of power are the same in business as they are in politics, that narcissism at the upper echelon is on the rise, not in decline, and that moral myopia is as prevalent as ever.

Moreover, leadership is still too often mistaken for good management, a leader being someone who motivates people to get things done quickly and efficiently. But that is management, not leadership. At best, leadership and management complement each other. At worst, we find only management but no leadership. Then, there is what Rost (1991) called the industrial paradigm in leadership research, imposing on researchers a leadership effectiveness focus—and a denial that leadership is a relational and normative phenomenon. Leadership values might be important, but leadership research is supposed to be value free, as if the ethics of leadership were something otherworldly. You ought to have it as a leader, but it is somehow a given, it comes with your upbringing and education, and therefore has no place in scientific research. As we browse through the myriad of publications on leadership, we thus find a lot on good (as in effective) leadership, but still very little on responsible leadership.

The challenge, however, is not so much the lack of awareness but the need for normative transformation (Ghoshal, 2005) to continue to define what responsible leadership is and how it can be applied in practice. To begin with, responsible leadership is a specific frame of mind promoting a shift from a purely economistic, positivist, and self-centered mindset to a frame of thinking that has all constituents and thus the common good in mind too. This normative transformation in leadership, the transition from one attractor pattern (Lorenz, cited in Morgan, 1997) to another, is long overdue, but it is starting (see also Anne Tsui, this volume). Then again, it is probably still true that we find almost as many definitions of leadership as we find authors, which has led Bennis and Nanus to the cynical observation: “Never have so many labored so long to say so little. Multiple interpretations of leadership exist, each providing a sliver of insight but each remaining an incomplete and wholly inadequate explanation” (1997: 4).

Among those interpretations, we find the ever popular great man theories, starting with Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun, both of whom are known for being effective leaders, and neither of whom is known for being a particularly ethical leader. Of course, we also find the great moral leaders of the twentieth century: the Gandhis, the Kings, and the Mandelas. The problem with concentrating on exceptional personalities, whether on bad or on good ones, is that we limit in a myopic way leadership and its capacity for influence and change to a small number of (mostly male) individuals who, in one way or another, by virtue of ability, destiny, or time in history, became outstanding leaders.

A variation of these theories focuses on charisma. But the problem of charisma with respect to responsible leadership is that it has no guiding ethical value. We cannot pinpoint the emotional relationship between leader and followers that is constituted by charisma and derive guiding principles from it. Charisma, from a moral point of view, is a useless concept (Ciulla, 2006) because it is an emotional attribution of leadership attributes by followers, something that may or may not occur, and history is littered with examples where it has been exploited for selfish goals and with deadly and disastrous consequences. Besides, from a business perspective,

if we select people principally for their charisma and their ability to drive up stock prices … instead of their character, and we shower them with inordinate rewards, why should we be surprised when they turn out to lack integrity?

(George, 2003: 5)

Other leadership theories have suggested that how leadership should be exercised depends on the situation. Some look at personal traits, and some at the power structure or the exchange of goods and services, that is, the transactional side of leadership. And yet, even the most sophisticated theories fall short when it comes to explaining what a leader’s and/or leadership responsibilities are, let alone considering the role of responsible leadership in a global stakeholder society with all its complexity in terms of values, interests, and cultures.

What exactly is responsible leadership in such a complex environment? What makes a responsible leader? And what needs to be done to develop responsible leaders? Along the lines of these key questions, we intend to initiate further discussion and research with this interdisciplinary collection of chapters. It was important to us to collect views on responsible leadership from a diverse group of experts to frame the topic from a broad perspective. Therefore, you find among our contributors philosophers, psychologists, psychoanalysts, business ethicists, economists, and management and leadership scholars as well as practitioners like learning and development experts, consultants, and senior executives, from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America. We are proud that half of the contributions are authored or co-authored by women. This diverse group of distinguished leadership scholars and practitioners who share a profound interest in the idea of responsible leadership and the moral dimension of leadership shed light on different aspects of one of today’s most challenging tasks: leading responsibly and building a respected business in society. By this, we may better understand what business leaders should—and should not—do, and also what they could do.

While leaders need certain capabilities and should have good character in order to be(come) responsible leaders, none are born that way. Nor is responsible leadership limited to individual traits. As we will see in what lies ahead, it is rather a balance of a leader’s character, the leader’s relationship with people and followers, the roles and tasks he or she fulfills, and sound processes. Responsible leadership depends not only on principled individuals and their education and training, but also on a “holding environment” (Kets de Vries, 1999: xvii)—relational ties and social capital and an organizational and environmental context where responsible leaders can flourish. As Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic turned Harvard professor, points out:

We need … people of the highest integrity, committed to building enduring organizations. We need leaders who have a deep sense of purpose and are true to their core values. We need leaders who have the courage … to meet the needs of all their stakeholders, and who recognize the importance of their service to society.

(George, 2003: 5)

Obviously, leadership in a stakeholder society has to be looked at differently and reach beyond traditional leader–follower concepts to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders with multiple interests based on different, often conflicting values. Leadership is, for the most part, “a complex moral relationship between people, based on trust, obligation, commitment, emotion, and a shared vision of the good” (Ciulla, 1998: xv). Hence, responsible leadership responds to existing gaps in leadership theory and the practical challenges facing leadership including expectations by stakeholders, not just employees, to do better and more. As such, it focuses on questions of responsibility—including accountability, appropriate moral decision making, legitimacy, and trust. In other words, responsible leadership seeks to define what “responsible” means in the context of leadership at the upper echelon of an organization. Being accountable for one’s actions, acting with one’s constituencies in mind, are not just semantic variations on the term “responsibility,” they are inherently relational concepts. By definition, responsible leadership is geared toward the concerns of others and seeks to clarify who the “others” are and what responding to their concerns entails.

Our original definition describes responsible leadership as “a relational and ethical phenomenon, which occurs in social processes of interaction with those who affect or are affected by leadership and have a stake in the purpose and vision of the leadership relationship” (Maak & Pless, 2006: 103). It broadens the traditional view of leader–subordinate relationships to leader–stakeholder relationships in response to the dramatic changes in leadership work over the past few decades. Responsible leadership requires from leaders distinct qualities, including relational intelligence: relational qualities driven by emotional, social, and ethical intelligence (Maak & Pless, 2005).

Accordingly, responsible leadership cannot be captured and defined by focusing on the leader alone—her relational qualities, values, and abilities to influence diverse constituencies—but must mirror the complexities of the leadership project and the context in which it happens. In other words, responsible leadership ought to be conceived as a multilevel concept, encompassing individual, team, organizational, and societal levels. This means that researchers have to push the boundaries of leadership research. At present, leadership research is still preoccupied with the leader and the traditional leader–follower dyad, when a socialized conceptualization of leadership is required. There is a limited view of leadership work, mainly focused on influence and effectiveness in teams and organizations rather than the full scope of the leadership project involving moral labor and both internal and external constituencies. We also face normative ignorance, or ethical myopia, by excluding moral motivation, virtues, and non-instrumental values from leadership research, as if these drivers, resulting in responsibility mindsets, were a private matter rather than a key ingredient of the leadership project.

Researchers in the responsible leadership domain deal with individual factors, such as values, virtues, and ethical decision making; organizational factors, including the links among corporate social responsibility, stakeholder theory, and leadership; and institutional factors and their influence on responsible leadership, such as the societal or cultural context, as defined by factors such as power distance and humane orientation that indicate the extent to which social concerns are part of cultural practices.

What has become clear since the publication of the first edition of this book is that effective responsible leadership requires leaders to focus on a compelling and credible purpose of their organization; a purpose that engages stakeholders and is geared toward legitimate and desirable objectives (Donaldson & Walsh, 2015; Pless, Maak, & Waldman, 2012). At the actor level, that purpose may best be promoted through a clear role identity of the leader, encompassing sense giving and the moral labor of responsible leadership. We have suggested elsewhere (Maak & Pless, 2006) that an enacted roles model enables leaders to integrate responsibilities, relationship, and purpose.

In conclusion, responsible leadership is a multilevel response to deficiencies in existing leadership frameworks and theories; to high-profile scandals on individual, organizational, and systemic levels; and to new and emerging social, ethical, and environmental challenges in an increasingly connected world. The scope and complexity of these challenges calls for responsible leadership and leaders who acknowledge their shared responsibility in tackling these grand challenges. Responsibility means being responsible for something and to someone, implying accountability and trustworthiness. As for the former, one would expect action and direction in line with a logic of appropriateness; as for the latter, responsible leadership is socially embedded and hence must be understood in its relational complexity. This in turn implies, of course, that responsible leaders are made, not born, and that responsible leadership needs to be nurtured and developed at the individual level, within teams, in organizations, and at the interface of business and society. It should come as no surprise then that responsible leadership requires the whole self: leader mindset, motivational drivers such as empathy and compassion, translated into responsible action and pro-social behavior.

In what follows, we intend to shed light on this complexity and hopefully set the stage for further inquiry and research, both theoretical and practical, at the interface of leadership theories, system thinking, stakeholder theory, social constructionism, and business ethics. Instead of three, the new edition of Responsible leadership will have five main parts. We start in the first part of the book with reflections on the notion of responsible leadership. The key question here is: What is responsible leadership? The chapters aim to identify the crucial dimensions of responsible leadership in business, thus laying the groundwork for a better understanding of its roots, requirements, and the relationships it is built on. In the second part of the book, we ask the question: What makes a responsible leader? The contributions here focus on the capabilities, virtues, and competences that individuals need to lead people and businesses in complex business environments—and the paradoxes they may face. The third part of the book focuses on responsible leadership in and across cultures; arguably, the digital economy has “turbocharged” the ongoing globalization of habits and marketplaces. Part IV seeks to illuminate the question of how to develop responsible leadership in business. In this part, we look at innovative initiatives and ways to further responsible leadership through the means of transformative change via professional networks, cross-sector partnerships, and learning and development programs. Finally, the concluding part looks at new directions in the 2020s and beyond, including the need for possible measurements of responsible leadership.

Part I: what is responsible leadership?

Joanne Ciulla, building on her pioneering work on ethical leadership, intr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• List of acronyms
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: the ongoing quest for responsible leadership in business
• Part I What is responsible leadership?
• Part II What makes a responsible leader?
• Part III Responsible leadership in and across cultures
• Part IV How to develop responsible leadership
• Part V Conclusion
• Index