Understanding Responsible Leadership as a Complex Process
Responsible leadership behavior has the potential to play a pivotal role in appropriately taming wicked challenges and tensions faced by organizations and society. Among other things, responsible leadership is focused on the long term, emphasizes relationships with internal and external stakeholders, and considers multiple bottom lines.
Traditional research focusing on responsible leadership has mirrored other leadership style research, primarily focusing on a mix of individual traits, intentions, skills, and examples of responsible behavior. This approach provides only a partial understanding of responsible leadership. Responsibility is highly situational and contextual, and fully understanding responsible leadership requires a lens that accommodates this contextuality and complexity. We therefore explore alternative models and methods to understand responsible leadership as a behavioral process. We anticipate our research will also offer insights into more productive methods for study ambiguous and highly situational concepts.
James Etheridge has been appointed to investigate this research project, thanks in part to a generous gift from a donors from the Nyenrode community. He will work with Dr. Melanie de Ruyter, Prof. dr. Pascale Peters and Dr. Jeroen van der Velden.
Why this research is important
'As organizations in the VUCA world are increasingly challenged by 'wicked problems,' the need for integrative and socially responsible leadership grows. Our goal is to expand our understanding of the emergence of responsible leadership.’
Dr. Jeroen van der Velden
Associate Professor
4 questions to James Etheridge
1. Can you tell us a bit about your research experience?
My background in research is in behavioral science and I previously I worked in public health program development and evaluation. Through this, I researched a wide variety of health behaviors, including vaccination, alcohol consumption, smoking/vaping, HIV/AIDS prevention, Ebola virus prevention, and more. I also was fortunate to work on projects in over 30 countries. I am now transferring what I know about health behavior research to organizational research.
2. What is it exactly that you are going to investigate?
There is a lot of research on the traits, roles, skills, and outcomes of responsible leadership, but less on what exactly responsible leaders do. The challenge is that what responsible leaders do is often highly contextual, or, in other words, what is and is not responsible really depends on the situation. Considering this, I am investigating different ways we can conceptualize and measure responsible leadership behaviors and their impact on a variety of organizational and societal outcomes. This includes individual behaviors like ethical decision-making processes and interpersonal behaviors related to communication and motivation. Moreover, it includes looking into methods that go beyond standard leadership surveys, such as network analysis approaches.
3. What results do you expect to get from the research?
We expect to develop a model for studying responsible leadership behavior and to apply this to identify different barriers and facilitators to responsible leadership behaviors.
4. Why did you choose to do your PhD at Nyenrode?
My supervisors! I was interested in Nyenrode because of its position between research and practice and was convinced that it was the right fit when I met my supervisor team.
About the researchers
Dr. Melanie de Ruiter is an associate professor at Nyenrode Business University. She is part of Nyenrode's Faculty Research Center for Strategy, Organization & Leadership. Her research focuses on psychological contracts, leadership, proactive behavior, well-being, and organizational change management.
Prof. dr. Pascale Peters is Professor of Strategic Human Resource Management at Nyenrode Business University. She is part of Nyenrode's Faculty Research Center for Strategy, Organization & Leadership.
Dr. Jeroen van der Velden is associate professor of Strategy Alignment and Director of Nyenrode's Faculty Research Center for Strategy, Organization & Leadership
James Etheridge MPH is PhD candidate at the Center for Strategy, Organization & Leadership at His research focuses on the conceptualization and measurement of “responsible leadership”, as well as the applicability of responsible leadership in taming wicked problems.
