Research seminar with Professor Christian Voegtlin, ZHAW School of Management and Law

The calls for responsible leadership have become more urgent over the last decades, with the world facing grand societal challenges, and more recently, geopolitical upheavals. Scholars have heeded this call and started to investigate what it means to be responsible and what the implications thereof are. Prof. Christian Voegtlin has focused in his research on responsible leadership since his PhD. Through his work he has contributed to a more coherent understanding of the theoretical and empirical foundations of responsible leadership in and of corporations. The research on responsible leadership closely connects to ideas of political CSR and examines the role of leaders engaging with stakeholders to agree on issues pertaining to social challenges. Responsible leaders thereby often assume quasipolitical roles as initiators and moderators of broader stakeholder deliberations.

In this seminar, Christian will outline the normative underpinning of his ideas on responsible leadership and present the empirical findings. He will then link the thoughts on responsible leadership to new challenges for leaders in business organizations that come with recent geopolitical developments. More specifically, democracy has come under pressure across the globe in recent years, with public trust in democratic institutions and processes eroding. Moreover, populist movements and parties the world over have strategically utilized communication tools to increase polarization over a variety of social, political, and environmental issues. He will present his recent work on (pro-democracy) CEO activism and discuss the relevance for our understanding of responsible leadership.

Participants will have the opportunity to engage with these innovative ideas and consider how they might apply to their own research or professional practice.

This seminar will be held in English.

This seminar is organized by LO. No pre-registration required.

Join us in person or online via Zoom:
https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/69139453578?pwd=T1RJV6NRjI4nLkdOaHxVvX7c8G9xbZ.1

References for further reading

Maak, T., Pless, N. M., & Voegtlin, C. (2016). Business statesman or shareholder advocate? CEO responsible leadership styles and the micro-foundations of political CSR. Journal of Management Studies, 53(3), 463-493.

Patzer, M., Voegtlin, C., & Scherer, A. G. (2018). The normative justification of integrative stakeholder engagement: A Habermasian view on responsible leadership. Business Ethics Quarterly, 28(3), 325-354.

Voegtlin, C., Frisch, C., Walther, A., & Schwab, P. (2020). Theoretical development and empirical examination of a three-roles model of responsible leadership. Journal of Business Ethics, 167(3), 411-431.

Research project on pro-democracy corporate activism: https://www.zhaw.ch/en/sml/institutescentres/
zcsl/news-detail/event-news/new-snf-project-at-zcsl-corporate-activism-and-democracy.