Status: completed
Description
Ethical misconduct and financial crises in the first decade of the 21st century have stimulated the call for more responsible leadership in business (Haque, Fernando, & Caputi, 2019). Latest developments, such as the Volkswagen emission scandal and the bankrupt of WeWork, that can be traced back to failures in management and irresponsible leadership behaviors reveal the persistent relevance of responsible leadership. Researchers and practitioners alike, thus, show an interest in understanding this phenomenon. Responsible leadership represents a social-relational and ethical phenomenon which implicates considering a variety of interests and actively involve diverse stakeholders so as to attain group, organizational, and societal goals (Doh et al., 2011; Pless et al., 2012; Waldman et al., 2019).
Responsible leaders, thus, have to balance external pressures of conflicting stakeholder interests with their internal tension to lead coherently and consistently with integrity across multiple contexts (Miska & Mendenhall, 2018). The definition emphasizes the underlying complexity of responsible leadership with respect to its various facets and the emerging challenges for leaders. Although a considerable amount of responsible leadership research has been published, the vast majority is of conceptual and often normative nature. However, to gain a comprehensive understanding of responsible leadership and its antecedents and outcomes, it is important to conduct empirical studies. For this purpose, a valid responsible leadership measure is needed. Existing responsible leadership measures (Doh et al., 2011; Voegtlin, 2011; Voegtlin et al., 2019) consist of Likert-type scales which do not consider the situational conditions. However, researchers highlight that leadership effectiveness depends in part on the situation (Peus et al., 2013) and request an increased contextualization in leadership research (Jordan et al., 2010). Furthermore, responsible leadership has been measured from employees’ perspective so far. One reason for this might be the attempt to reduce social desirability tendencies. Employees, though, although representing a primary stakeholder group, may not have the ability to assess their leaders’ responsible leadership behavior in all relevant contexts and with regard to all relevant stakeholders.
Therefore, this research project aims at developing a situational judgement test of responsible leadership that addresses the situation-based and multi-stakeholder perspective. Leaders will have to evaluate alternative reactions to relevant leadership situations. Thus, leaders themselves will indicate their potential behaviors in critical situations with conflicting stakeholder interests. By presenting several realistic behaviors to them, social desirability shall be reduced. The prototypical multi-stakeholder situations will be generated through interviews with leaders applying the critical incident technique. A pilot study will serve to test the item responses developed. Additional studies will address scoring key development, content validity, incremental validity and interrater agreement. Besides, a laboratory experiment will serve as a pretest. Based on this, the SJT can be applied in empirical studies to analyze relevant antecedents and outcomes of responsible leadership.
Involved Persons
