Leadership Research Summary:
- Although organizational citizenship behavior for the environment (OCBE) literature has highlighted the critical role of leadership on the emergence of OCBE, there is still room for further research exploration of how and when leaders influence subordinates’ OCBE. According to social identity theory, we propose a theoretical model that responsible leadership promotes subordinates’ OCBE by examining subordinates’ moral identity as a mediator and individualism as a boundary condition.
- Using a sample of 273 collected in China, results indicated that responsible leadership was positively related to subordinates’ moral identity, which in turn was positively related to subordinates’ OCBE. Subordinates’ moral identity partially mediated the relationship between responsible leadership and their OCBE. In addition, both the relationship between responsible leadership and subordinates’ moral identity and the indirect relationship between responsible leadership and subordinates’ OCBE were stronger when individualism was lower. These findings provide novel insights into how responsible leadership influences OCBE and how such influence is shaped by subordinates’ individualism.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- This research offers several implications for practice. First, the findings in this study suggest that responsible leadership can be useful in facilitating subordinates’ moral identity and OCBE. Indeed, to enable organizations to achieve sustainable development in an ever-changing marketplace, previous research has begun to call for teaching managers to be responsible leaders (Doh and Quigley, 2014; Antunes and Franco, 2016). Therefore, organizations should train their current leaders to develop responsible leaders. For example, organizations can help leaders clarify their roles and behaviors by formulating explicit rules of duty (Maak and Pless, 2006) that are combined with the goals of organizational development, conducting courses on supervisors’ sense of responsibility (Voegtlin et al., 2012), and establishing a long-term learning mechanism to cultivate and develop the comprehensive leadership ability of responsible leaders (Maak et al., 2016). In addition, when recruiting members and selecting leaders, the human resource management department can determine relevant assessment standards, comprehensively evaluate their cognitive abilities, values, and moral quality (Pless, 2007; Maak et al., 2016), and further assess their consistency using organizational values (Liu and Lin, 2017). Doing so can assist organizations in identifying the personnel with the potential for responsible leadership.
- Second, this research presents subordinates’ moral identity as a bridge that links responsible leadership to their OCBE. Hence, selecting subordinates who display moral identity could present an avenue for enhancing OCBE in a responsible organization. The extant literature has begun to focus on the importance of behaving ethically and improving the moral identity of subordinates in an organization (Trevino et al., 2014). On the one hand, leaders should care about and restrain unethical behavior in the organization, support subordinates’ ethical behavior, attach importance to subordinates’ opinions, and involve them in participating in organizational decision making to increase their moral identity (Doh and Quigley, 2014). On the other hand, organizations need to establish moral norms and require its members to be responsible for unethical behavior (Kaptein, 2010), provide moral training to improve subordinates’ moral cognition (Mulder and Aquino, 2013), and form a moral organizational culture to cultivate their moral values to attract ethical applicants to join the organization during the recruiting process and to retain subordinates who value ethics (Rupp et al., 2013; May et al., 2015). In addition, according to social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Tajfel, 1982), when employees have a positive social identity with the group and organization they belong to, they will improve their attitudes and behaviors to align with the organization’s behavioral norms, values and goals. Therefore, managers need to emphasize and enhance employees’ inter group identity in the organization, such as creating a label like “our team” in the organizational culture, trying to incorporate the concept of inter group identity into important management practices, and incorporating inter group identity into performance evaluations and incentive programs to further increase employees’ motivation for OCBE (Aquino and Reed, 2002; May et al., 2015).
- Finally, the positive effect of responsible leadership in enhancing subordinates’ OCBE through their moral identity was found to be weaker for subordinates with strong individualism. This finding suggests that an organization’s responsible leaders should be aware that their behavior may lead to different reactions depending on their subordinates’ individual cultural values. From the perspective of contingency, leaders need to flexibly take corresponding measures with subordinates with different degrees of individualism. Therefore, to better match the responsible leadership, corresponding measures need to be taken to judge the degree of subordinates’ individualism.
- Leaders may be trained to infer the degree of individualism of their subordinates by observing their behaviors. During the recruitment process, a systematic assessment can be carried out through personal tests to better understand the degree of individualism of the candidates. Leaders can then use such information to adjust their subordinates’ coping strategies with different degrees of individualism to ensure that responsible leadership can generate stronger moral identity among them. In addition, for subordinates with strong individualism, organizations need to set interdependent tasks to improve their cooperative behavior (Earley, 1989; Wagner, 1995) and establish an organizational culture of cooperation and sharing to reduce the degree of individualism (Morris et al., 1993).
Leadership Research Summary:
- Women remain minimally represented in senior leadership roles in sport, despite increased female participation in both sport, sport management education programs, and in entry levels positions in the industry. Many women prematurely exit mid-level leadership positions in sport, or are often overlooked for senior leadership positions. To uncover the experiences and strategies of women who made it through the process, we interviewed all the women (N = 7) who now hold senior leadership positions with professional sport properties in Canada. Participants revealed they overcame real and perceived barriers, and they suggested women seeking senior leadership roles in the industry: (a) find, and later become role models, mentors, and sponsors; (b) create access to networks and opportunities; (c) strategically self-promote, and; (d) purposefully build a varied career portfolio. Recommendations for the industry and all those who work in the industry are presented with a goal to break the cycle and help ensure more equitable and inclusive leaders in the senior leadership ranks.