Responsible Leadership: Development of a Situational Judgement Test

Ethical misconduct and financial crises in the first decade of the 21^st century have stimulated the call for more responsible leadership (RL) in business (Doh et al., 2011). Latest developments, such as the Volkswagen emission scandal, that can be traced back to failures in management and irresponsible leadership behaviors reveal the persistent relevance of RL. Researchers and practitioners alike, thus, show an interest in understanding this phenomenon.

RL represents a social-relational and ethical phenomenon which implicates considering a variety of interests and actively involve diverse stakeholders so as to attain group, organizational, and societal goals (Doh et al., 2011; Maak & Pless, 2006). Responsible leaders, thus, have to balance external pressures of conflicting stakeholder interests with their internal tension to lead coherently and consistently with integrity across multiple contexts (Miska & Mendenhall, 2018). The definition emphasizes the underlying complexity of RL with respect to its various facets and the emerging challenges for leaders. Although a considerable amount of RL research has been published, the vast majority is of conceptual and often normative nature. However, to gain a comprehensive understanding of RL and its antecedents and outcomes, it is important to conduct empirical studies. For this purpose, a valid RL measure is needed. Existing RL measures (Doh et al., 2011, Voegtlin, 2011) consist of Likert-type scales which do not consider the situational conditions. However, researchers highlight that leadership effectiveness depends in part on the situation (Peus et al., 2013) and request an increased contextualization in leadership research (Jordan et al., 2010). Furthermore, RL has been measured from employees’ perspective so far. One reason for this might be the attempt to reduce social desirability tendencies. Employees, though, although representing a primary stakeholder group, may not have the ability to assess their leaders’ RL behavior in all relevant contexts and with regard to all relevant stakeholders.

Therefore, this research project aims at developing a situational judgement test of RL that addresses the situation-based and multi-stakeholder perspective. Leaders will have to evaluate alternative reactions to relevant leadership situations. Thus, leaders themselves will indicate their potential behaviors in critical situations with conflicting stakeholder interests. By presenting several realistic behaviors to them, social desirability shall be reduced. The prototypical multi-stakeholder situations will be generated through interviews with leaders applying the critical incident technique. A pilot study will serve to test the item responses developed. Additional studies will address scoring key development, content validity, incremental validity and interrater agreement. Based on this, the SJT can be applied in empirical studies to analyze relevant antecedents and outcomes of RL.