A Multidimensional Measure of Responsible Leadership: Integrating Strategy and Ethics

Abstract

Research on leadership generally discusses the normative and strategic perspectives of leadership separately. However, in the context of stakeholder theory and corporate sustainability, researchers and practitioners have called for the integration of these two seemingly disparate perspectives to create a hybrid leadership framework. In this regard, theoretical work on responsible leadership (RL) combines the disciplines of ethics and strategy to propose integrative behaviors. Nonetheless, RL mostly has been explored as a one-dimensional concept with stakeholder welfare as the focus. Although this aspect is salient, leaders must display other ethical and strategic behaviors to respond to the changing demands of business. Therefore, we combine such behaviors into one RL framework. Through a strategic lens, we define the first two dimensions of RL as sustainable growth focus and multistakeholder consideration. Furthermore, these goal-setting behaviors are looked upon as genuine when they depend on leaders’ ethical behaviors. Therefore, we consider ethical leadership to be an inherent part of RL through the dimensions of the moral person and moral manager. Across four quantitative studies, we test the construct validity of the suggested four-factor structure of RL as well as its ability to predict relevant organizational outcomes such as individual followers’ moral courage and citizenship behaviors toward stakeholders.