Abstract
In recent years, the quality of management education in general, and particularly of MBA and Executive MBA programs, has been called into question. There are serious doubts about universities’ ability to give students the competencies they need to deal with complex problems in modern society. One part of the discussion focuses on ethical issues and the process through which students develop values and attitudes. In line with the economic crisis, there has been increasing interest in the development of learners’ attitudes to responsibility.
 We report the results of a study that starts with an ambitious and yet ill-structured learning goal in a demanding educational practice area: How can pedagogical interventions in management education be designed to promote learners' attitudes to responsible leadership? As a starting point, there are neither consensual definitions of responsible leadership nor substantial theories available to design promising interventions. De-sign-based research (DBR) provides a structured process to deal with research problems, starting with innovative but imprecisely defined objectives and unknown ways to reach them.
 We introduce the DBR design and describe the research process and results from a project conducted at St.Gallen University’s Executive MBA program. In close collaboration with practitioners, interventions evolved through multiple cycles of development, testing and refinement with the pursuit of theory-building and practical innovation.
Highlights
This study’s starting point is the intense and enduring debate about the different problems associated with management education generally, and with traditional MBA and executive MBA programs
In a first step, based on the literature review results, we developed a preliminary theoretical notion of responsible leadership, which we differentiated and concretized further by conducting 13 in-depth interviews with participants of St.Gallen University’s Executive MBA program
As a result of the literature review and subsequent qualitative interviews, four main concepts emerged as key components of responsible leadership:
Summary
This study’s starting point is the intense and enduring debate about the different problems associated with management education generally, and with traditional MBA and executive MBA programs. In light of the economic, social, and environmental crisis, there is a growing interest in management education regarding developing learner attitudes to responsibility and sustain-ability. Over the past few years, influential initiatives have emerged; these include the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative (GRLI, 2005), with its vision of developing a generation of responsible leaders. Starting from this context, we addresses the following key question: How can pedagogical interventions be designed that nurture learners’ attitudes to responsible leadership?. The key research question requires the identification of relevant theories on the nature of attitudes and attitude change and the review of theories and concepts on the responsible leadership construct
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