Reconciling Different Views on Responsible Leadership: A Rationality-Based Approach

Christof Miska (), Christian Hilbe () and Susanne Mayer ()

Journal of Business Ethics, 2014, vol. 125, issue 2, 349-360

Abstract: Business leaders are increasingly responsible for the societal and environmental impacts of their actions. Yet conceptual views on responsible leadership differ in their definitions and theoretical foundations. This study attempts to reconcile these diverse views and uncover the phenomenon from a business leader’s point of view. Based on rational egoism theory, this article proposes a formal mathematical model of responsible leadership that considers different types of incentives for stakeholder engagement. The analyses reveal that monetary and instrumental incentives are neither sufficient nor necessary for business leaders to consider societal and environmental stakeholder needs. Non-monetary and non-instrumental incentives, such as leaders’ values and authenticity, as well as their planning horizons, counterbalance pure monetary and instrumental orientations. The model in this article complements the growing body of research on responsible leadership by reconciling its various conceptual views and providing a foundation for future theory development and testing. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Keywords: Responsible leadership; Rational egoism theory; Stakeholder–stockholder dichotomy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10551-013-1923-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:125:y:2014:i:2:p:349-360

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-013-1923-8

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().