Responsible Leadership

Realism and Romanticism

Steve Kempster, Brigid Carroll, Steve Kempster, Brigid Carroll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317395331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

It is time for the development of a new kind of business leadership. Global needs call for a revision of market capitalism and a move towards moral capitalism; a move "from value to values, from shareholders to stakeholders, and from balance sheets to balanced development" (Kofi Annan).

With the challenge of this transition in mind, this book argues that it is time for a new understanding of leadership, a new romanticism which looks behind the overvalued, heroic leadership notion. The editors explore a romanticized rhetoric and situate it within current discourses of authentic, distributed and ethical leadership, where societal, economic and environmental challenges require us to take a collective lead towards doing good and growing well.

Exploring this dichotomy of romantic ideal and essential requirement, this book combines the insights of leading academics and with those of practitioners in the field. Thought-provoking and engaging it will challenge both thinking and practice, and is essential reading for all those operating or researching in the field of leadership, particularly those who realize the overwhelming challenges of sustainability, and corporate social responsibility which the world now faces.

1 Introduction

Responsible leadership – realism and romanticism

Steve Kempster and Brigid Carroll

If you have followed leadership scholarship to any degree and are well acquainted with the tendency of leadership to arrive with new adjectives before it – transformational, authentic, ethical, relational leadership all being examples – it would be understandable to think that such a new descriptor heralds a whole new school of leadership thinking. That’s not what this book is about. We would prefer that responsible leadership inserts itself as a critical stimulant to supply enough grit and intrigue to catalyse some new questions about the state of leadership thinking through its myriad forms. After all, responsibility is surely axiomatic with almost any variation of leadership theory, to the point that it is referenced constantly but almost never theorised or explored in its own right. If this book creates a critical engagement with responsibility in leadership – what it means to be responsible, who is responsible, and the relationships, dynamics, and networks that form and reform that ‘who’, what leadership is responsible for, what responsibility looks and feels like for the different actors involved, how responsibility is constructed, deconstructed and identified – then this book will achieve something of value.

We will be open straightaway about the drivers for this book. Responsible leadership theory has been largely driven by our colleagues in the corporate social responsibility space who quite naturally looked across to leadership research to help the progression of corporate social responsibility thinking and found precious little to work with. To be blunt, they found a body of thinking on leadership that didn’t appear to be interested in the big, pressing challenges facing the world; that seemed to be narrowly focused on the dynamics between people in positions and their direct reports to meet organisational performance expectations, and that seemed over-disposed to view leadership as an offshoot of personality, character or psychological traits and their development. Yes, we are being provocative here, but we are inviting just a glimpse of the leadership body of work and community from another field who were disappointed and not satisfied with what they saw. Responsible leadership theory grew directly out of this lack and gap between a society facing challenges that require a big picture, multiple party, long-term process, and what we know about how influence, change, and movement happen in the patterns of leading and following that occur between people with different and unequal positions, power, and passion.

It is important to say that this thinking on responsible leadership is very much in its infancy. We call it a theory and can point to strong starting scholarly contributions; and there has been an enthusiastic embrace of it by those who want to support corporates, particularly to engage with issues that go beyond a traditional focus on financial bottom lines. However, in truth there is much we do not know in this intersection of leadership, responsibility, and whole-world challenges. In reading this book we can guarantee that you will be drawn into the very largest of leadership questions, will meet all kinds of assumptions about leaders and leadership given the ferment and contestation intrinsic to the field, and you will be drawn in by cases, stories, and examples of how responsibility is both understood and practised. Our wish is that you leave with questions and real vigour not to take responsibility too lightly and not to let it lie largely unexamined as it has done to date.

To aid us in this enterprise we have inserted responsible leadership between two other movements – between romanticism and realism. We will pick up what we mean by these in a later section but for now, we invite you to have a feel or experience of them in this terrain of leadership and responsibility. Consider the following from Derick de Jongh, Director of the Centre for Responsible Leadership (2005, p. 47):

Just Imagine. Imagine a world where harmony, equity, social cohesion, ethical conduct, a sustainable environment and a just society dominate the thoughts and minds of all leaders, business, government and civil society…. Imagine leaders who translate these personal ideals into standard business practice…. Imagine leaders who take personal interest and commit themselves emotionally to the real world we want to create…

Pause a moment, not to reflect on that passage exactly, but your response to that passage. Of course there will be a whole raft of responses to such words but we think there will be two strong clusters of responses that loosely translate to our terms of ‘romanticism’ and ‘realism’. The first would be characterised by an excitement and idealism on reading those words. Strong in such an idealism would be notions of possibility, a sense of values or morals or ethics, and something we could call belief or hope that is associated with seeing something other than what is. We want to call that ‘romanticism’. Another response, however, looks roughly the opposite and could feel like a sense of déjà vu or cynicism coloured by disbelief, experience, or what we might call a reality check. Strong in that is a desire to see more than powerful words and statements and an understanding that profound shifts and changes belie enormous complexity and the navigation through difference, conflict, and clashing assumptions. We would like to call this ‘realism’. We argue that not only does responsible leadership inherently risk these two responses, but it needs them as vital points of reference in its quest to engage leadership in larger more meaningful issues, at the same time as bringing the complexity of collective and collaborative dynamics in the pursuit of solving them. In this introductory chapter we work on ‘laying the table’ of responsible leadership amidst the settings, flavours, and ‘tools’ of romanticism and realism.

So much discussion on the theme of responsible leadership assumes, rightly in our view, that great change is required in the practices and responsibilities associated with leadership. Calls for leadership to embrace a broader and deeper kind of responsibility should set in motion a real examination of the shortfalls of traditional ways of thinking about leadership, alongside new possibilities for its redefinition and redevelopment. Working this between our poles of romanticism and realism should result in a treatment of responsible leadership not simply as ‘utopian’ but as ‘realistic utopian’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 127). We need to remember Meindl’s seminal work on the ‘romance of leadership’ as an exploration of the tendency (both within the literature and in organisational settings) to overestimate the significance of leadership and its impact on organisational success. Developed by Meindl (1995), the phrase itself refers to the follower tendency to attribute responsibility for company performance to organisational leaders. We have much sympathy with this view when seen through a narrow, heroic, and individualistic lens. We would wish, however, to reintroduce the romanticised rhetoric to situate it within current leadership discourses regarding authentic, distributed, and ethical leadership where the societal, economic, and environmental challenges do require us to collectively take the lead in moving forward towards doing good and growing well. In this way, we see the need for both perspectives of realism and romanticism to be embraced.

In the remainder of this chapter we wish to sketch out responsible leadership, romanticism, and realism in turn in very broad brushstrokes as a way of representing the central concerns, questions, and discourses of the turns and twists that each chapter will provide. We then briefly introduce the chapters that follow and attempt to represent some of the remaining trajectory of this book.

Responsibility in leadership?

Whilst responsible leadership is termed a theory, we don’t wish to present it as a body of thinking that has gained any real closure yet. Rather we view this as a perspective or lens that is very much work in progress, that enables another way in which to debate and examine leadership. Our perspective is to assume that responsibility is axiomatic to leadership. The emphasis then is on the nature and manifestation of such responsibility (or irresponsibility) within the practice of leading that requires attention. Attention in the sense of developing insight, understanding, explanation, and theorising in order to have impact on responsibility in leading. That is the broader objective of this volume.

Placing orientation on responsibility within leading rather than the development of the theory of responsible leadership is not to devalue the very helpful arguments and expositions of theories of ‘responsible leadership’ that will be explored by authors in this volume. This work provides many useful frames to examine the context, antecedents, processes, and outcomes of what enables/disables the manifestation of responsibility in the practice of leading. It offers up helpful guidance towards an appreciation of a variety of dimensions of responsibility in leadership. However, in itself it does not bring enough theoretical and empirical weight to the construct of responsibility, which like all constructs has a legacy of psychological, sociological, philosophical, historical, and literary thinking that can only enrich our understanding and practice of leadership. Hence we welcome an engagement with responsibility in its fullest form. To this end, we offer here ten propositions alongside ten questions that we see as shaping the development of responsible leadership at and beyond the present time.

First, is its attention and even commitment to social responsibility and the related field of CSR (Waldman & Balven, 2014).

What assumptions have driven the definition and meaning of responsibility in the social responsibility and CSR fields, and how do these confront, clash with, and extend responsibility in leadership?

Second, it seems willing to assume applicability to multiple levels of responsibility – the individual, the team, the department, the organisation, and broadly societal (Doh & Quigley, 2014; Voegtlin, Patzer, & Scherer, 2012).

Given that leadership tends to operate between levels, then what processes and practices are required to enact responsibility between people and groups with different power, position, and privilege? What paradoxes, insights, or mysteries arise when each of these levels becomes the focal point for responsible leadership?

Third, it seeks to go beyond a shareholder perspective to embrace a stake-holder perspective (Maak & Pless, 2006a; Waldman & Galvin, 2008).

Given the less direct and more networked relationship between stake-holders, then what kind of leadership engages and mobilises parties with very different interests, agendas, and institutional narratives? What assumptions, discourses, and histories shape the priorities given to competing stakeholders? Why, how, and where does responsible leadership challenge and unsettle these priorities?

Fourth, is its reliance on ethical assumptions to do no harm and do good (Ciulla, 2006; Stahl & Sully de Luque, 2014) connected with notions of duty – duty of care, duty of assistance, and duty of justice (Maak & Pless, 2009).

What kind of relationship exists between leadership, responsibility, and ethics? What kinds of questions, practices, and identities would help those in leadership hold the kind of conversations where competing ethical principles could be aired? What assumptions, discourses, and histories have driven the notions of duty and ethics within organisations and how do they shape what it means to lead responsibly?

Fifth, it tries to be sensitive to global intercultural sensitivity (Miska, Stahl, & Mendenhall, 2013), a global citizen orientation and a call to cosmopolitanism (Maak & Pless, 2009), as well as Turnbull, Case, Edwards, Schedlitzki, & Simpson’s (2011) notion of ‘worldly’ leadership.

What tensions and paradoxes arise in a globalised world, and what does it mean to lead responsibly amid these? How is leadership challenged and stretched by responsible global citizenship, and what does it mean to lead in such a dispersed, diverse, and distributed context?

Sixth, it pursues an outcome orientation to responsibility that, for example, addresses Elkington’s (1997) notion of the triple bottom line, but additional to the economic, societal, and ecological it encourages a humanitarian perspective (Maak & Pless 2009).

What tensions, conflicts, and paradoxes do corporates particularly encounter when they attempt to ‘balance’ financial, environmental, social, and humanitarian possibilities?

Seventh, it engages with processes of sense-making and sense-giving strongly linked with questions of purpose (Kempster, Jackson, & Conroy, 2011).

If responsibility emerges between people in interactions (as opposed to being intrinsic to someone a priori in any situation) then how do moments of giving and making sense co-create what it means to be responsible? What is the role of purpose in sustaining, driving, and connecting responsible leadership across time and boundaries?

Eighth, responsible leadership implies a shared orientation (Pearce, Wassenaar, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontmatter Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Foreword: The romance and realism of responsible leadership
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction Responsible leadership – realism and romanticism
• Interrogating, critiquing, and strengthening responsible leadership theory
• 2 Mapping the terrain of responsible leadership Something old, something new, something borrowed, something green
• 3 From responsibility to responsibilities Towards a theory of co-responsible leadership
• Connecting responsible leadership theory to practice
• 4 This green pastoral landscape Values, responsible leadership, and the romantic imagination
• 5 Leadership responsibility and calling The role of calling in a woman's choice to lead
• 6 Responsible leadership A radical view
• Developing responsible leadership
• 7 Responsible leadership, trust, and the role of Human Resource Management
• 8 Promoting responsibility, purpose, and romanticism in business schools
• 9 Developing responsible leadership through discourse ethics
• 10 Developing ‘next generation' globally responsible leadership Generation Y perspectives on global responsibility, leadership, and integrity
• 11 Romanticism, antimodernism, and a pluralistic perspective on responsible leadership
• Index