Daina Mazutis

Leading Organizational Learning Through Authentic Dialogue

This article explores how authentic leaders enable learning in organizations through the mechanism of dialogue. Using Crossan et al.s multi-level framework, we examine how top managers who exhibit the authentic leadership capabilities of self-awareness, balanced processing, self-regulation and relational transparency can shape an organizational culture characterized by authentic dialogue. This culture then supports feed-forward and feedback learning across individual, group and organizational levels, promoting and reinforcing double-loop learning. We develop propositions that integrate the leadership and organizational learning literatures and offer suggestions for future research.

Leadership and corporate responsibility: a review of the empirical evidence

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consolidate the state of the empirical research to date on the relationship between leadership and corporate responsibility. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conduct a comprehensive, systematic and narrative review of all published quantitative studies that have examined the link between leadership and corporate responsibility broadly defined, and the authors put forward an integrative model encapsulating current knowledge in this domain. Findings – The authors not only identify validated direct, indirect and moderating effects of leadership on corporate responsibility but also point to gaps in the literature that imply important directions for further research. Originality/value – The authors aim to make the following contributions to both the leadership and the corporate responsibility literatures. First, the systematic and narrative review in and of itself provides an important consolidation of existing knowledge in both domains. Second, the authors co...

Sleepwalking into Catastrophe: Cognitive Biases and Corporate Climate Change Inertia

Despite the consensus that climate change will have huge consequences not just for the planet but also on corporate operations, businesses continue to fail to adjust their strategic decision-making processes to become more sustainable. One of the silent culprits behind climate change inertia lies in the cognitive biases at play in corporate decision making. This article builds on existing strategic decision-making models to explain how biases prevent managers from accurately identifying the moral dimensions of climate change. It also presents a broad range of practical interventions for how this constraint can be overcome.

Much Ado about Nothing: The Glacial Pace of CSR Implementation in Practice

Abstract Over the last several decades, businesses have faced mounting pressures from diverse stakeholders to alter their corporate operations to become more socially and environmentally responsible. In turn, many firms appear to have responded by implementing more sustainable practices — measuring, documenting, and publishing annual CSR or sustainability reports to showcase how they are addressing important issues in this area, including: resource stewardship, waste management, greenhouse gas emission reductions, fair and safe labor practices, amongst other stakeholder concerns. And yet, research in this domain has not yet systematically examined whether businesses have, on the whole, changed their practices in tandem with the important changes in its institutional context over time. Have corporate CSR initiatives, in fact, been growing over the last 25 years or has the increased attention to CSR actually been much ado about nothing? In this chapter, we review the empirical literature on CSR to uncover that common measures of CSR such as the KLD do not support the concept that CSR practices have increased substantively over the last 25 years. We supplement this historical review by modeling the growth curves of CSR implementation in practice and find that the pace of positive change has indeed been glacial. More alarmingly, we also look at corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) and find that, contrary to expectations, businesses have become more, not less, irresponsible during this same time period. Implications of these findings for theory are presented as are suggestions for future research in this domain.

CEO open executive orientation and positive CSR initiative adoption

Despite popular anecdotal examples that link the personal values, beliefs or characteristics of business leaders to the socially responsible nature of their companies, very little is actually known...