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Leadership and corporate social responsibility
Edited by Ellen Van Velsor
Introduction
Growing challenges posed by diminishing scarce resources, increased awareness of uneven global developments, and consumption driven by particularist market forces creating a need for sustainable development all call for new forms of environmentally aware leadership. Such leadership takes organisations forward in a socially conscious manner, making decisions based not only on tangible, financial issues and short term gains, but also on intangible or non-financial issues involving sustainable growth. We term this "corporate socially responsible (CSR) leadership". Being a CSR leader is more than wanting to help the planet. CSR leadership is a difficult path to pursue, full of contradictions and dilemmas, where the overall destination depends on first determining a number of linking staging posts. For example, investing in social programmes requires the buy in of varying stakeholders and, in particular, shareholders who may hold different personal and organisational priorities. As Chester [1] Barnard (1938, p. 262) observed, "the conduct of every man is in part governed by several private moral codes". However, "if there exists several or many private codes governing the conduct of an individual, specific acts or concrete situations are likely to involve conflicts between codes" ([1] Barnard, 1938, p. 263). Thus, an individual may feel responsible for some moral codes, but not so with respect to others, particularly if they are juxtaposed to each other, as sometimes are contractual obligations (e.g. to shareholders) and moral determinations (e.g., to preservation of environment). As Chester [1] Barnard (1938, p. 262) points out, whatever morality exists in the individual becomes effective only in conduct.
Leading for sustainable social responsibility
On the way to gaining an understanding of CSR leadership is the need to analyse its components which, in turn, surfaces a complexity of paradoxes. The ability to run an efficient and profitable business can be consistent with a CSR agenda, but occasions will occur when the corporate financial agenda is not always consistent with stated CSR goals. In those instances, a level-headed look at integration is key to CSR goals being realised, rather than just talked about, through truly socially responsible leadership.
The "endurance of organisations depends on the quality of leaders; and that quality derives from the breadth of the morality upon...