Taking Responsibility for Corporate Social Responsibility: The Role of Leaders in Creating, Implementing, Sustaining, or Avoiding Socially Responsible Firm Behaviors

This article investigates microfoundations of corporate social responsibility and corporate social irresponsibility by focusing on how leaders influence both activities. An organizing framework, drawn from the leadership literature, is utilized to combine scholarship on individual traits, behaviors, and shared leadership as antecedents to corporate social responsibility and corporate social irresponsibility activities. Resulting combinations highlight the multidimensional nature of corporate social responsibility and the benefits of focusing on emerging work on servant leadership. Merging the corporate social responsibility and leadership literatures demonstrates how each can strengthen the other and illustrates new types of individual-level questions to explore when drawing on such connections. Specifically, corporate social responsibility provides context and outcomes (dependent variables) to leadership scholars; the leadership literature offers process models and explanatory mechanisms to corporate social responsibility.