Understanding Responcible Leadership: Role Identity and Motivational Drivers A case of Nicola N. Pless

1. Understanding Responsible
Leadership:
Role Identity and Motivational
Drivers
Rizwan Qamar

2. Understanding Responsible Leadership: Role Identity
and Motivational Drivers
• Dr. Nicola M. Pless
Visiting Senior Research Fellow
UNIVERSITY OF ST. GALLEN,
Switzerland
Reader and Research Director
• Source: Journal of Business Ethics,
Vol. 74, No. 4, Ethics in and of
Global Organizations:
• The EBEN 19th Annual Conference
in Vienna (Sep., 2007), pp. 437-456
• Published by: Springer

3. Responsible Leadership
• Responsible leadership is about
making business decisions that,
• next to the interests of the
shareholders,
• also takes into account all the
other stakeholders,
• such as workers, clients, suppliers,
the environment,
• the community and future
generations.

4. Author’s Exploration
• Relationship between responsible leadership
behavior and the underlying motivational systems.
– What are the driving forces behind responsible leadership
behavior?
– What role does childhood play in the development of a
responsible leader?
– How do motivational drivers translate into responsible
leadership behavior?

5. Motivational Drivers
• Intrapsychic Drivers (For Self)
– Need for exploration and assertion
– Need for attachment and affiliation
– Sense of enjoyment
• Normative Drivers (For Others)
– Need for justice
– Need for recognition
– Sense of care

6. The Roles Model of Responsible
Leadership
Source: Adapted from Maak and Pless (2006b).

7. Methodology
• It is Qualitative Research
• Researcher used a narrative approach
• Analyzing the biography of ANITA RODDICK
understand the phenomenon
• In order to do so, the Author has considered
the whole life story of the Single person
• She has suggested that it can help understand
and explain why and how Anita Roddick has
developed into the Responsible Leader

8. Anita Lucia Roddick
• Born: 23 October 1942, , England
• Known for: Businesswoman,
founder of The Body
Shop, charity work. She is widely
recognized as being a socially
responsible leader
• Spouse: Gordon Roddick
• Death: 10 September
2007 (aged 64), England
• Death reason: Cerebral
hemorrhage

9. The Body Shop
• Industry: Cosmetics
• Established: 26 March 1976
• Place: England, United Kingdom
• Naming Rights: In 1987 The Body
Shop.
• Outlets: 2,605 (2010)
• No. of Courtiers Operations: 61
• The Body Shop agreed to a £652.3
million takeover by L'Oreal

10. The Body Shop Products

11. Charitable Works
• The Body Shop Foundation
• Children On The Edge (COTE)
• Donated 9.5 Million Starlings
• She was known for her campaigning work on
environmental issues
• Animal Protection
• The Body Shop has undertaken periodic
independent social audits of its activities

12. How motivational factors affect on
Roddick`s life.
• Need for exploration and assertion
• She was aware of that to feel constantly the thrill of
the unexpected”.
• She wanted to learn more and more.
• She has given very importance, to learn from
experience.
• Teachers, mentors and coaches have great impact on
the learning.
• Enjoying, Passion and Fun
• She identifies passion her driving force in life.
• She enjoyed what she did in her life.
• She made fun as part of Body shop business
mission.
• Her mother tells love, romantic stories.
• She treated every person and thing with love.
Through love she earned trust.

13. Cont….d
• Attachment and Differentiation
• In business, as in life, she needs to be
entertained, to have a sense of family, to
be part of community.
• Justice, Care and Responsibility.
• Her mother taught ethics in her
childhood. Her sister who was a nun
instilled a sense of care and respect for
the deprived class. She learned these all
from her childhood.

14. Responsible Leadership Behavior
• Leader as a visionary
Leaders in the business world should aspire to be true
planetary citizens. They have global
responsibilities since their decisions affect not just
the world of business, but world problems of
poverty, national security and the environment.
Many, sad to say, duck these responsibilities,
because their vision is material rather than moral.
(Roddick, 1991, 226).
• Leader as a steward
A lot of people ? those who did not know us very well
- thought that after going public we would
perhaps sell up and retire to a life of indolent
luxury. Gordon and I never remotely considered
doing such a thing. The Body Shop was too much
our baby ever to let it go.

15. Cont….d
• Leader as a servant
– Caring for employees
– Caring for customers
– Caring for communities
– Caring for the environment
– Caring for suppliers
• Leader as a citizen and change agent
• she used this citizenship spirit as a means of
turning the "The Body Shop vision ? of
making the world a better place - into
reality" (Roddick, 1991).
• In 1985, the first year as a public company,
Anita Roddick and The Body Shop started
their campaigning trail following the motto
that "businesses have the power to do good"
(Roddick, 2005).

16. Cont….d
• Leader as a net worker
• Anita Roddick understands herself as a relationship
builder and a networker: "the bUss of my job is
networking ? finding people with visions similar to
mine, or even greater." (Roddick, 1991)
• Living leadership, and leadership by experience and
not by rhetoric. So like going to visit one of our
community trade projects ? no founder ever goes
and sits in a bloody mud hut for three days holding
babies, with flies or fleas. But that was the
expectation of the people I work with, that I'd be
doing that, that I'd be in the middle. They were
absolutely and rightly expecting me to be right in
the middle of Afghanistan to see if I could find a
community trade project. (Roddick, 2002, 4, 24-29).

17. Cont….d
• Leader as a story teller
• Storytelling served her as a form
of leadership to achieve different
objectives:
• To create a common values-based
spirit
• To create a common glue in the
vast growing global network of
local shops and franchises
• To lead and manage change
• To foster a cooperative and
human working environment

18. Lessons Learned
• Responsible leader is driven by a values based
vision
• Responsible leadership manifests itself in
defining moments
• Responsible leadership can be understood as the
art of building and sustaining social and moral
relationships between business leaders and
different stakeholders (followers)
• Responsible leadership is rooted in an ethics of
care driven by a desire to serve others.