Responsible Global Leadership

The quest for responsible leadership is a response to large-scale business scandals and to stakeholders’ expectations that corporations and their leaders contribute to the "triple bottom line" by creating environmental, social, and economic value. In this chapter, we explore what it means to be a “responsible” leader. Specifically, we analyze the challenges and dilemmas facing executives in four key corporate social responsibility (CSR) domains: diversity, ethics, sustainability, and citizenship. On this basis, we describe three prototypical approaches to CSR - global, local, and transnational - and discuss their implications for global executives, with a particular focus on tensions and trade-offs between globally integrated and locally adapted CSR strategies, the constraints they impose on managerial behavior, and the competencies they require in global leaders. We conclude by discussing approaches for promoting responsible global leadership in organizations and offering recommendations how organizations can effectively prevent, manage, and control the risks of irresponsible leader behavior.