The responsible leader's servant role

In the advent of uncertain times and corporate scandals, responsible leadership answers the call for a normative and ethical approach to fostering communication and building relationships with multiple stakeholders for the benefit of the organization being led and for society as a whole. Responsible leaders accomplish this by taking on the roles of a steward, citizen, visionary, and that of the servant. In scholarly research, these roles have been studied from the leadership perspective. What remains to be theoretically supported and empirically validated is the followership influence of stakeholders on the responsible leader. In accordance with this dimension, we dissect the responsible leader's servant role, analyze the ways in which the servant role has been influenced by servant leadership, and begin to theorize the bidirectional influence of the responsible leader and multiple stakeholders. We find the influence of stakeholders, as followers, on a responsible leader is maximized when the web of stakeholder involvement and interaction is highly connected. It is theorized that new possibilities for sustainable value creation and responsible change emerge from connections and conversation among stakeholders that yield collective intelligence.