How does responsible leadership emerge? An emergentist perspective

Abstract

Increasing academic and practitioner conversations regarding corporate responsibility, have led some leadership scholars to question the possibilities to accomplish responsible leadership. Drawing on an emergentist perspective, through an empirical study in three organizations, the article develops the responsible leadership literature by offering a critical analysis of the emergence of responsible leadership. Our key finding is that responsible leadership emerges as participants’ ‘shared concerns’, namely: ‘environmental and communal concerns’, ‘professional concerns’, ‘employment concerns’, and ‘commercial concerns’, which constitute social arrangements that give meaning to what is responsible and possible. The theoretical perspective we develop highlights the conditioning role of shared and nested concerns of the study participants and unpack how the social context variously shapes responsible leadership.