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Responsible leadership is a concept that links leadership, corporate social responsibility, sustainability and ethics to business performance and actions of senior executives and board members. This keynote illuminates how responsible leadership mindsets and their diverse understandings of the purpose of business are related to organizational level stakeholder engagement and corporate social responsibility approaches at the upper echelon. A first link is established between broader social movements (e.g., US Business Roundtable, Conscious Capitalism, Social Entrepreneurship movement) and the social identity of responsible leaders, thereby contributing to the discussion of the changing nature of the purpose of business. The article closes with a Q&A session.

Today’s pressing global societal challenges are urgent and require substantial solutions and innovations that tackle the roots of a problem. These challenges call for new forms of leadership, stakeholder engagement and innovation. This paper aims to examine whether, why and how business leaders engage in social innovation. The authors argue that leadership perspective and motivation are important drivers for developing substantial social innovations suited to resolving societal challenges at their roots. More specifically, the authors propose that intra-personal factors (degree of care and compassion), an inter-relational perspective of leadership (shareholder versus stakeholder) and the corresponding leadership motivation (personalized versus socialized) may unveil what quality of social innovation (first-order versus second-order solutions) is pursued by a business leader. Implications for future research and practice are provided.

The authors revisit the concept of social innovation and explore its connection with care and compassion. They suggest a series of propositions pertaining to the relationship between different configurations of leadership and different forms of social innovation.

Responsible business leaders with an integrative leader trait configuration (stakeholder perspective, socialized motivation, high degree of care and compassion) are more likely to foster substantial second-order social innovations for uprooting societal problems than business leader with an instrumental leader trait configuration (shareholder perspective, personalized motivation, low degree of care and compassion). An organization’s stakeholder culture plays a moderating role in the relation between leadership and social innovation.

This paper reveals a path for conceptualizing leadership in social innovation from a stakeholder perspective. Future research should investigate the role of business leaders, their mindsets, styles and relational competencies in co-creation processes of social innovation empirically. If the development of substantial second-order social innovations requires leaders with a stakeholder perspective and socialized approach, then this has implications for leader selection and development.

This paper advocates for new kinds of leaders in facilitating and sustaining social innovations to tackle global societal challenges.

Two major trends have shaped the international business field over the past decade: globalization and the quest for responsible leadership. Yet, what are the qualities that predispose business leaders to act responsibly in an increasingly complex, interlinked world, and thus to meet new social, environmental, and political responsibilities? How can organizations develop these qualities in their current and future leaders? In this chapter, we provide tentative answers to both questions by fleshing out some of the qualities global leaders need to succeed in a connected world and by comparing three innovative executive development programs that use international service learning assignments as a way to instill these qualities in their executives. These programs are PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Ulysses Program, Pfizer’s Global Health Fellows Program, and IBM’s Corporate Service Corps.

As the world struggled to come to grips with the Covid-19 pandemic, over twenty scholars, practitioners, and global leaders wrote brief essays for this curated chapter on the role of global leadership in this extreme example of a global crisis. Their thoughts span helpful theoretical breakthroughs to essential, pragmatic adaptations by companies.

International service learning is a new trend in management development and a new field of research. International Service Learning Programs (ISLP) are experiential corporate volunteering initiatives designed to give employees the chance to work for a short spell abroad (often in a developing or emerging market) on a service assignment with a partner from the social sector (e.g. NGO, social enterprise). The service assignment is a project defined with a social-sector partner on which the corporate employee works full-time on a pro-bono basis and contributes his/her knowledge and expertise in exchange for a rich learning experience. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the use of ISLP in business firms and conducts a comparative analysis of six programs set up by multinational corporations from three industries (health, technology, and accounting and professional services). It identifies characteristics and similarities among programs, discusses differences, offers criteria for program classification and areas for future research. As such, it is an important starting point for quantitative studies.

This is a qualitative study based on six ISLP. The data were gathered through desk research, interviews with program representatives and a structured questionnaire containing closed and open-ended questions.

Regardless of the stated aims (which usually stress value for the participants, the company and the communities), most programs had one clear focus (two programs in the area of leadership development, two in the area of community development) while two showed closely linked foci (with slightly greater emphasis on organization development than on the other areas).

The authors suggest that the type of ISLP has an effect on the learning outcomes. Since companies are still testing usefulness and outcomes of these programs, academic research that provides comparative quantitative data on the outcomes of such programs is of great value for business practice.

This systematic overview and classification of ISLP is a starting point for empirical program comparisons as well as for the evaluation of different service learning approaches. This could prove very useful for other companies planning to set up or refine their own ISLP to achieve certain outcomes.

This is the first paper that compares ISLP run by multinational corporations. It identifies a number of category areas in which they differ (e.g. in placement length, nature of the assignment – individual or in teams, learning methods used) and provides a typology for program classification (leadership development, organization development or community development).

This chapter focuses on a proposed framework of irresponsible leadership (IRL) that might emerge in our schools under certain circumstances. A second purpose is to analyze potential ways to prevent its rise, based on previous models of educational leadership. Broadly, IRL is composed of five elements: narrow view of education, a business-like view of the teacher–student relations, a Narcissist and ego-centrist view, self-centered decision making, and emotional unawareness and poor emotion regulation. Unsurprisingly, IRL results in decreased levels of teachers’ and students’ well-being, unethical school climate, a lack of social responsibility in the teacher lounge, and school failure. To prevent these and related results, three major leadership models in education – participative, moral and social justice, and instructional – were analyzed.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

In the cult book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy it took a computer seven and a half million years to come up with an “answer to life, the universe, and everything”. And a pretty confusing answer it was too. If they had asked it to come up with an unambiguous and straightforward answer to “what makes a good leader?” it might have taken even longer and been even more confusing in its response.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.