Getting Personal About Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): Exploring the Values That Motivate Leaders to Be Responsible

To understand why one company is socially responsible and another is not, we might examine its leadership. Senior leaders not only make decisions that drive organisational performance, but also establish rules and norms for corporate social responsibility. They decide to be ethical (or not), to engage stakeholders (or not), and to balance financial, social, and environmental interests (or not). Unfortunately, we know little about how leaders make their decisions, except that they are informed by personal values. This study attempts to bridge this gap in our understanding by exploring the practices and motivations of senior leaders. Examining leaders’ values-based decisions may also be a pathway to understanding incidents of corporate social irresponsibility. Using criteria from emerging research on responsible leadership, we identified a sample of senior leaders from a list of top employers in Canada (2016). Top employers are recognised nationally in Canada for their success in providing quality workplaces and engaging with the community. Given their achievements as top employers, we proposed that these leaders would also be responsible leaders, i.e., they would define responsibility broadly, and consider the interests of multiple stakeholders in corporate decisions and actions. The literature describes two general types of responsible leaders: integrative and instrumental. The integrative leader takes a broad approach to responsibility and is accountable to multiple stakeholders; the instrumental leader is financially focused and accountable primarily to shareholders. Most of the leaders in this study demonstrated the characteristics and practices of the integrative leader, a mindset considered the gold standard of socially responsible leadership. However, these individuals were not perfectly aligned with that standard because they also showed a trait more often associated with the instrumental leader: competitiveness. Our findings led us to conclude that competition is also a necessary component of the contemporary integrative leader’s mindset. But it is how these individuals compete that places them more on the integrative end of the continuum, as opposed to the instrumental end. The value dimensions we explore are preliminary and in need of further development, yet they shed light on the challenges and realities that leaders face in the global marketplace. The findings may inform current research frameworks for responsible leadership and spark discussions around our expectations for leaders in a competitive corporate environment.