Responsible school leadership and teachers' emotional exhaustion: The moderated mediation role of work meaningfulness and proactive personality.

This research paper examines the role of responsible and irresponsible leadership in two major crises: the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Russia-Ukraine War. The paper provides a background and context for responsible leadership and an overview of the two crises. The purpose and significance of the research paper are discussed, along with an analysis of the leadership style of key figures in each crisis. The paper evaluates how President Kennedy’s responsible leadership approach contributed to a successful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how Khrushchev’s irresponsible leadership approach contributed to an escalation of the crisis. Similarly, the paper examines how President Putin’s responsible leadership approach contributed to a more stable and peaceful resolution of the Russia-Ukraine War, while Yanukovych’s irresponsible leadership approach contributed to the destabilization of Ukraine. The paper concludes by discussing the importance of responsible leadership principles in crises, highlighting how leaders who prioritize transparency, ethical decision-making, and a commitment to promoting the broader social, economic, and environmental interests of the population can build trust, reduce tensions, and promote peaceful solutions. The paper also highlights the consequences of leaders who prioritize their own interests over the broader interests of the population, disregard democratic norms, and engage in deceptive or unethical behavior, which can contribute to instability, escalation, and conflict. Overall, this research paper contributes to a better understanding of the impact of responsible and irresponsible leadership in crises and highlights the need for leaders to prioritize responsible leadership principles in all aspects of their decision-making process, particularly during times of crisis.

PurposeLeaders are under increasing pressure to cultivate an engaged workforce in responsible ways, but how and when responsible leadership is related to employee work engagement remains unclear. Hence, this study aims to unfold the responsible leadership–work engagement relationship by exploring the mediating role of intrinsic corporate social responsibility (CSR) attributions and the moderating role of interactional justice.Design/methodology/approachA multiphase sample of 225 was collected from employees from the Chinese manufacturing industry. Hierarchical regression and PROCESS macro in SPSS were used to test the authors’ moderated mediation model.FindingsThe results demonstrate that responsible leadership is directly related to work engagement and indirectly related to it via employees' intrinsic CSR attributions. Interactional justice significantly strengthens the positive relationship between responsible leadership and intrinsic CSR attributions as well as the mediating effects of intrinsic CSR attributions.Practical implicationsTo cultivate an engaged workforce that improves organizational effectiveness, firms and managers should facilitate responsible leadership, signal sincere motives of CSR activities and enhance fair interpersonal treatment at work. These can also be helpful in various fields (e.g. promoting public trust).Originality/valueBased on social learning theory and attribution theory, this study empirically reveals the role of responsible leadership in enhancing work engagement. It sheds new light on the psychological mechanism and the boundary condition explaining how and when this linkage occurs, which advances research on responsible leadership and the individual-level analysis of CSR.

Purpose – While traditionally, the workplace primarily focused on fulfilling individuals' basic needs, there is a growing recognition of the importance of meeting psychological needs as well. Employees now desire well-being, satisfaction, and a sense of meaning in their work lives. Factors such as meaningful work, job resources, and leadership styles play a crucial role in fostering these positive experiences and influencing organizational commitment. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the impact of responsible leadership and meaningful work on work engagement among female employees in the automotive sector within the Ankara Organized Industrial Zone (OSTİM). Specifically, the study will examine the direct effects of responsible leadership on work engagement and the mediating role of meaningful work in this relationship. This focus on responsible leadership stems from its increasing recognition as a critical aspect of responsible leadership that considers the needs of various stakeholders while promoting individual and organizational well-being. Design/methodology/approach – This research was conducted in Ankara Organized Industrial Zone (OSTIM) in Turkiye with a sample of 242 people. Findings – It was concluded that responsible leadership positively impacts work engagement and that meaningful work mediates this relationship. Discussion – This study examined the impact of responsible leadership on work engagement, with a specific focus on the mediating role of meaningful work, among female employees in the automotive sector within the Ankara Organized Industrial Zone (OSTİM). The findings indicated a significant positive relationship between responsible leadership and work engagement, and further revealed that meaningful work partially mediated this relationship. These results offer valuable theoretical contributions and practical implications for organizations and managers.

‘Responsible Leadership' is said to be a gift of ‘Management Education' as these two complement and supplement each other. However, this ‘gift-giving' comes in for serious criticism during times of economic crisis, corporate scandals, and ethical violations. The perception that management education ensures responsible global leadership is being questioned. There is a growing demand to re-vitalize management education and make it more meaningful, ethical and beneficial to the global society than just as a status-booster degree with a managerial tool-kit. The B-schools feel the pressure to shift their focus from producing such ‘tool-kit managers' and redefine themselves as centers for responsible leadership development. The ethical challenge in management education for global leadership and sense making sustainable development is the focus of this study. Relevant literature reviews and survey responses show optimism that the dream of passionate and visibly responsible global leadership can come true with vibrant industry-academia association in ethically healthy climate.

Relational leadership and responsible leadership are important subjects in the literature, and more attention can be paid to these leadership practices in educational leadership. Most educational leadership studies focus on distributed, instructional, teacher, and transformational leadership using mostly quantitative research. The aim is to explore and describe relational and responsible leadership in the context of educational leadership. Qualitative research methodology such as narrative inquiry is not often used for inquiries into educational leadership studies. Moreover, the scholarship on narrative inquiry as a relational methodology for relational and responsible educational leadership is scant, and there is a need to broaden the discussion to include appropriate the concepts of relational leadership and responsible leadership for educational leadership in a context of relational narrative inquiry. Relational and responsible leadership theories can be appropriated through a relational research methodology using narrative inquiry. These scholarly lenses may add value to school leadership research and to school leaders who wish to transform and change leadership practices, specifically in diverse school communities with challenging and problematic educational landscapes.

Drawing on the job demands-resources model and positive organizational scholarship, this study examines proactive personality as an antecedent of frontline employees’ proactive customer-service performance (PCSP). It also investigates the potential mediating role of positive psychological states on the relation between proactive personality and PCSP and the potential moderating role of the service-failure recovery climate (SFRC) on the relation between proactive personality and positive psychological states. To test our hypotheses, we used a moderated parallel mediation model and data obtained from 62 branch managers and 358 frontline branch employees of three well-known appliance households and 3C (computers, communications, and consumer electronics) chain stores in Taiwan. The results of multiple-regression and SPSS PROCESS macro analyses indicate that proactive personality was positively related to manager-rated PCSP via employees’ work engagement and perceptions that their work was meaningful. Further, the positive relationship between proactive personality and PCSP through both work engagement and meaningful work perceptions was moderated by SFRC. These findings shed light on the effect of frontline employees’ proactive personality as a personal resource driving their PCSP; the roles of positive psychological states as mediators that help explain the potential intermediary mechanisms; and a boundary condition of SFRC that may weaken the positive relationship between employees’ proactive personality and psychological states. The implications, limitations, and future research directions are included.

Shaping emotional reactions to ethical behaviors: Proactive personality as a substitute for ethical leadership

Purpose: Due to the significant global crises over the past decade, understanding leadership's role in reducing the pernicious impact of crises has recently garnered substantial attention. This study examines the role of school leaders in enhancing teachers’ psychosocial capacity following a devastating earthquake that struck the southern regions of Türkiye in 2023. It compares the earthquake-affected and non-affected regions in terms of the role of responsible leadership in teacher resilience and wellbeing. Method: The data were collected from 1,133 teachers working in earthquake-affected and non-affected areas. A t-test analysis was conducted to examine differences in reported leadership, resilience and wellbeing, followed by a multigroup structural equation modeling analysis and Wald test to examine differences between the two regions in terms of the relationships between responsible leadership and resilience and wellbeing. Findings: The study showed that teachers in earthquake-affected regions reported significantly lower levels of resilience and wellbeing. Responsible leadership was positively related to teacher resilience and wellbeing, with resilience also mediating the relationship between leadership and wellbeing. The multigroup analysis revealed that the relationship between responsible leadership and teacher resilience, as well as the indirect relationship between responsible leadership and teacher wellbeing mediated by teacher resilience, was significantly stronger in earthquake-affected regions. Conclusion: Responsible school leadership could be especially important in turbulent times. This research contributes to the growing body of literature on leadership in times of crisis, providing insights for educational policymakers and school leaders to support educators in disaster-affected contexts.

Purpose: At a time when school leadership takes on great import, we must ask how leadership can move beyond a focus on individual- and school-level changes to collective leadership that relies on the strength of relationships between schools and the communities in which they reside to foster and sustain change. Such leadership is termed responsible leadership. Using a conceptual framework for responsible business leadership and data from a large-scale multinational study on Performing Beyond Expectations, this article formulates a theory for responsible educational leadership. Research Design: Data come from the Performing Beyond Expectations project, a large-scale international study undertaken from 2007 to 2010. This study used qualitative interviews and analysis of documentary data to explore how organizations in business, education, and sport achieve exceptionally high performance, given their size, client base, and previous performance. The project included more than 220 interviews and 18 sites. Analysis in this article focuses on the responsible leadership found in three schools in one local authority and the ways in which each leader uses relationships to improve the school and student achievement. Findings: All three leaders see the purpose of leadership as developing relationships and attribute their performance beyond expectations to the strength of these relationships. As responsible leaders, they view their role as not only raising and sustaining pupil achievement but also weaving leadership throughout the web of stakeholders including students, parents, and community agencies. This collectivization of leadership is a hallmark of responsible leadership.

Hybrid work stressors and psychological withdrawal behavior: A moderated mediation model of emotional exhaustion and proactive personality

Based on the conservation of resources theory, this study aims to create new knowledge on the antecedents of emotional exhaustion. We explore the internal mechanism and boundary conditions of the impact of ethical leadership on emotional exhaustion, using data gathered from 460 frontline service employees at an airport in China. Employees completed questionnaires regarding ethical leadership, emotional exhaustion, organizational embeddedness, job satisfaction, and demographic variables. After controlling for the effects of demographic variables and company tenure, ethical leadership was found to have a negative impact on emotional exhaustion (β = −0.128, p < 0.01), and to be positively related to organizational embeddedness (β = 0.518, p < 0.01). After adding in the mediating variable (organizational embeddedness), the effect of ethical leadership on emotional exhaustion was no longer significant (β = 0.012, ns), while organizational embeddedness emerged as significantly related to emotional exhaustion (β = −0.269, p < 0.01), implying that the effect of ethical leadership on emotional exhaustion was completely mediated by organizational embeddedness. Simultaneously, the results suggested that job satisfaction could strengthen the mediating effect of organizational embeddedness on emotional exhaustion (the difference in the mediating effect between the groups with respective high and low job satisfaction was −0.096, p < 0.05). This study proposed and validated a moderated mediation model, the implications of which are that ethical leadership is an effective way to alleviate frontline service employees’ emotional exhaustion.

BackgroundIn today’s uncertain organizational environment, employee creativity has become the key driver of enterprise sustainability. Although previous studies have found the influence of responsible leadership on employee creativity, there remains a lack of study on how responsible leadership promotes employee creativity via intrinsic motivation mechanisms and what situational factors may moderate this process. This paper aims to construct a moderate-mediation model to examine the impact of responsible leadership and employee creativity through social cognitive theory and situational strength theory.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a multi-source, time-lagged data collection between June and July 2023. At Time 1, subordinates assessed responsible leadership and psychological empowerment. At Time 2, conducted 4 weeks later, the same subordinates evaluated the leader’s encouragement of creativity and their employee creativity. In total, 1,126 participants completed both waves of data collection.FindingsThe results suggest that responsible leadership has a positive effect on both psychological empowerment and employee creativity. Moreover, psychological empowerment partially mediates the relationship between responsible leadership and employee creativity. The extent to which a leader promotes creativity can influence how responsible leadership and psychological empowerment contribute to employee creativity.ConclusionsThis study reveals the internal psychological mechanisms and situational boundaries through which responsible leadership influences employee creativity, thereby enriching the theoretical foundation of leadership and creativity research. The findings indicate that organizations should prioritize the development of responsible leadership, strengthening psychological empowerment mechanisms, and promoting a supportive, creative environment. This includes encouraging creativity, promoting fault-tolerant experimentation, and implementing recognition systems to fully unlock employees’ creative potential.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has placed an unprecedented strain on healthcare systems and their workers worldwide, including nurses. Frontline nurses experienced increased levels of stress and fatigue due to extensive and prolonged work hours, inadequate protective equipment, and fear of contracting the virus. This has resulted in a rise in emotional exhaustion among nurses. Therefore, it is crucial for organizations to address these challenges to sustain workers’ psychological wellbeing for better patient outcomes.Purpose/ObjectivePast studies have shown no link between responsible leadership (RL) and nurses’ occupational calling (OC) and emotional exhaustion (EE) amid COVID-9 or any situational setting. Therefore, this study evaluated the effectiveness of RL practices in improving the OC and alleviating the EE of nurses working in the COVID-19 ward of 94 government healthcare settings, including rural health centers (RHCs) and special COVID-19 response centers (CRCs), in Pakistan.MethodologyThe study employed a quasi-experimental pre-and post-design with responsible leadership-based interventions and a descriptive approach. Leadership practices included effective communication on COVID-19 guidelines, infection control measures, mental health support services, and others. An online questionnaire survey measured pre- and post-intervention effects using RL, OC, and EE scales. The sample comprised 289 frontline nurses, recruited via convenient sampling, who participated in a three-months program in the COVID-19 ward. Data analysis was conducted using AMOS and SPSS software, involving basic analysis and paired T-tests.FindingsThe paired t-test results revealed a significant improvement in nurses’ OC after the implementation of the RL intervention. The mean score for OC increased from 5.162 (SD = 1.151; t-value = 76.253) to 5.403 (SD = 1.054; t-value = 87.138; p < 0.001). Similarly, the intervention significantly reduced EE among nurses. The mean score for EE decreased from 4.386 (SD = 1.037; t-value = 71.879) to 3.614 (SD = 1.336; t-value = 45.987; p < 0.001). Both were statistically significant.Implications for nursing managementPolicymakers may need to consider the role of leadership practices in mitigating the negative effects of the pandemic on healthcare professionals’ well-being (i.e., EE and OC).ConclusionsLeadership intervention can provide healthcare workers with the necessary skills and resources to cope with the challenges of their jobs, ultimately improving the quality of care provided to patients.

PurposeThe increased interest of the industrial sector in sustainable concepts and leadership has lagged behind conceptual advancement. Leaders are increasingly being pushed to encourage sustainable performance. In order to examine the relationship between responsible leadership and sustainable performance, this research creates a model based on the logic of RL performance, with the concurrent mediation of epistemic motivation and moderating role of sustainable climate.Design/methodology/approachThe current research analyzed a sample of 520 respondents from employees recruited from public sector organizations in Pakistan who were full-time employees in Punjab province in three waves with an interval of two weeks in each wave. To collect data, the scales are adapted from past studies that were relevant to this study. The data received from the survey questionnaire are analyzed using SEM.FindingsThe study's findings demonstrate a significant as well as positive association between RL and SP with β = 0.298 and p < 0.001. Further, a significant mediating impact of epistemic motivation on the relationship between RL and sustainable performance with β = 0.238 and p < 0.001 is also evident. Epistemic motivation is an important mediator because transparency in knowledge held massive importance to get sustainable outcomes and is predominant factor to exert his/her efforts.Practical implicationsThe research shows some theoretical and practical implications. To achieve the aims of sustainable development, organizations should first encourage responsible leadership behaviors. By establishing a shared vision and goals, top management can encourage responsible leadership techniques within their jurisdiction. In order to encourage responsible leadership behaviors, organizations should seek to create capacity at both organizational and social levels. It will change employee attitudes and provide the knowledge needed to achieve sustainable development objectives.Originality/valueThis is one of the initial studies to examine the relationship between responsible leadership and sustainable performance. Further, the concept of social exchange theory is used to understand sustainable performance from a comprehensive standpoint.

Purpose In the light of conservation of resources theory and social learning theory, the current research investigates the impact of responsible leadership over unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) and unethical pro-family behavior (UPFB) via sequential mediation of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and emotional exhaustion. Moreover, it investigated the positive and negative effects of responsible leadership such that a responsible leader lessens UPB of employees, but it might cause unintentional UPFB through sequential mediation of OCB and emotional exhaustion. Design/methodology/approach The research data consist of supervisor-subordinate matching dyads in a time-lagged pattern from faculty and administrative staff of public universities in two waves. Findings The findings of the study reveal an indirect relationship between responsible leadership and unethical pro-social behavior via sequential mediation of OCB and emotional exhaustion. Originality/value Highlighting the importance of unethical practices at the workplace, the current study examines the effect of responsible leadership on unethical pro-social behavior. The study is novel in that it simultaneously investigates the bright and dark effects of responsible leadership in the context of higher education institutions.