Responsible Leadership Research: A Bibliometric Review.
| Autor | Marques, Tania |
| Cargo | Report |
Introduction
Responsible leadership is fast becoming a hot topic both in academia and in the business world. Two reasons seem to compete to boost this interest. Firstly, the growing complexity and connectedness in society, in which organizations, workers, clients, suppliers, public entities, environmental institutions, and citizens in general are becoming interdependent pieces of a gigantic and dynamic social puzzle. Secondly, the increasing awareness, public interest and intervention in financial crises, unemployment, massive layoffs, downsizings, environmental problems, corporate scandals and unethical misconduct in business. Managers and leaders' responsibilities and ethical behavior have been receiving higher levels of attention (Shi & Ye, 2016); hence corporate and managerial responsiveness has been under public scrutiny more than ever (Pfeffer, 2015). In his seminal paper, Stodgill (1950) highlighted leadership as one of the world's oldest concerns, as exemplified by Homer's book the Iliad and the Greek heroes. According to Stogdill (1950, p. 3), leadership can be considered as "the process (act) of influencing the activities of an organized group in its efforts toward goal setting and goal achievement". The word influence has in fact become part of many definitions of leadership, thus showing that leadership is a relational process in which one part exerts some kind of inducement over another part. A very popular definition is Yukl's (2006), who sees leadership as a process in which certain individuals understand and influence what needs to be done and how to do it, as well as facilitate individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives.
Responsible leadership advances the existing definitions of leadership and takes into account the way leaders use their power. Responsible leadership points out that the influencing power of leaders should be used to improve everybody's lives, rather than contributing to the destruction of value of individual careers, organizations, economies, and societies. In that sense, responsible leaders influence all stakeholders (internal and external), not just employees. Responsible leadership is therefore distinct from other perspectives of leadership (e.g. transactional/transformational or ethical) as it is anchored in the assumption that leaders must balance different (and potentially conflicting) sets of interests. Responsible leadership, thus, becomes a key theme to understand, and one which organizations and decision-makers alike should stimulate and educate people about.
Although a recent concept, responsible leadership has attracted much research attention (Shi & Ye, 2016), but literature has failed to offer a systematic description of the key ideas, concepts and theoretical approaches underlying the research. Thus, no organized and systematic review has been offered, leaving the knowledge on the field scattered through numerous publications. Reviewing the extant knowledge in a field allows understanding of the main theoretical approaches and themes, as well as identification of the gaps and key opportunities for further advancement of the field. Our bibliometric review contributes to fill this research gap by offering an objective analysis of the responsible leadership field.
The study uses bibliometric techniques to map the knowledge structure of responsible leadership research for the last decade (2006-2016). Bibliometric studies focus on published books, documents and journals aiming at the measurement of knowledge or the understanding of publications (Teixeira, Iwamoto, & Medeiros, 2013). Bibliometric studies allow for a more systematic analysis of the literature and are less prone to researcher biases given the use of a quantitative approach. Using bibliometric techniques allows characterizing the existing knowledge and the underlying intellectual structure of responsible leadership literature. Hence the current work analyzes responsible leadership articles in journals indexed in the Thomson Reuter's ISI Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). The time-range for the articles retrieved was 2006-2016 (October). Four analyses are performed: authorship, citation, co-citation and factor analysis of the existing research on responsible leadership.
The paper is structured as follows. Firstly, a brief theoretical background is given with regards to responsible leadership. Secondly, the methodology is explained, including design, sample, procedures and analyses. Thirdly, the results are put forward. Finally, the paper ends with a discussion and concluding remarks, including contributions, limitations and future research avenues.
Theoretical Background
Leadership has been one of the most researched topics in organizational studies, management, and many other related areas. Leadership is said to be paramount for key organizational issues such as performance (e.g. Howell & Avolio, 1993), but also for many other individual, group, and organizational indicators (e.g. G. Wang, Oh, Courtright, & Colbert, 2011). In recent years, research has focused on the goodness of leadership, i.e., the characteristics and behaviors that, in the process of leadership help to develop individuals, encourage positive relationships, support ethical and moral standards, and stimulate efficient social dynamics in organizations. Such has been the center tenet of transformational leadership, which sees leaders and workers engaging in interactional-based relationships, exchanging values and other personal and professional-type of stimulus (Tal & Gordon, 2016). Transformational leadership assumes that workers evolve as professionals and persons, via the influencing capacity of leaders in shaping vision, moral values, coherence, inspiration, and ethics (Burns, 1978).
Even though the advancements in theory propose a generic positive feeling about the goodness of leadership, practice is plagued with evil leadership in all sectors and organizations (Pfeffer, 2015). In fact, in recent years the world has witnessed various social protests and movements based on individuals and workers' disillusionment with an economic model grounded on efficiency and profits, which are the basic premises of capitalism. The expression "Capitalism is under attack" (Beinhocker & Hanauer, 2014, p. 160) characterizes such general feelings, and although governments' responsibility appears to be difficult to substantiate in the immense political web of issues and lack of trust, business leaders may start operating changes to use their influence and trust for the better (Maak & Pless, 2006a). Thus, a paradigm shift is needed for leaders in a business setting.
The paradigm shift for business leaders has been increasingly populated with new notions, concepts, and theories of leadership, and as something that needs to bring a more positive impact into human lives. Recent terms include servant, ethical, authentic, spiritual and humble leadership. In a similar vein, the notion of responsible leadership has caught considerable attention, which was initially understood by Maak and Pless (2006b, p. 99) as "a social-relational and ethical phenomenon, which occurs in social processes of interaction". The authors see responsible leadership within a broad framework, as all stakeholders that interact with the leader are considered followers, whether they are from inside or outside the organization. Hence, leaders need to constantly adapt their styles and behaviors to these various internal and external stakeholders from inside or outside the organization. In the literature, this has been paralleled by an increasing exploration of more complex, shared and collective leadership types (Tal & Gordon, 2016), in which the role of the leader is essentially relational, as well as one of coordinating and cultivating relationships between all stakeholder groups.
In this sense, responsible leadership is distinct from other leadership theories, such as transactional/transformational leadership, or ethical leadership, because its ethos is rooted in the need to maintain a complex and dynamic balance between various--and often conflicting--sets of interests. For accomplishing such challenging goals, Voegtlin, Patzer and Scherer (2012) assert that responsible leadership ought to maintain an ethical perspective, while assuring the requisites for efficiency and efficacy. Thus responsible leadership is also likely to have a wider and deeper impact on multiple outcomes. Wider, because more stakeholders now need to be included inside the overall leadership sphere; and deeper, because the effects of leadership at individual levels interact to cause further effects. Although much is still to be explored regarding responsible leadership, it is likely that the concept represents a radical new view of leadership.
Tal and Gordon (2016) have recently published a bibliometric review of the current approaches to leadership, dividing them into two main categories: those that have appeared since the mid-20th century, and which treat leadership as a hierarchical system on a stable framework; and those more recent approaches that focus on a more complex, flexible and changing framework. Responsible leadership, probably due to its newness and more relational global approach, is truly a very recent arrival in the literature, with the first works making their debut in the beginning of the 21st century. Despite being recent, approximately within the last decade, the topic has gained a high level of attention in management research (Shi & Ye, 2016), which nevertheless has not been accompanied by a systematization of the ideas, concepts, and key theories already being used by active researchers. Such is the purpose of the current research, which intends to organize and give structure to the existing literature on responsible leadership.
Methodology
Design
Bibliometric studies have gained popularity in the Management area in recent years (Teixeira et al...
Para continuar a ler
PEÇA SUA AVALIAÇÃOCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
