Abstract:
Responsible leadership is crucial for rural businesses in the United Kingdom
as it provides dynamic relationships based on social construction within a
contextual process where managers, employees, and other stakeholders
deploy rooted responsible principles to ensure business survival and
sustainability in their actions. Previous studies investigated responsible
leadership in terms of reorientation of the current management system,
sustainable decision-making process and the need for more partnerships in
the organisations. However, there is a need for responsible leadership
principles to be implemented in rural business, supported by relevant
research and evidence that will bring benefit to all stakeholders. Systematic
review studies on responsible leadership and rural businesses in the United
Kingdom are scarce. From this viewpoint, the main purpose of this research
is to foster the knowledge of the role of responsible leadership in rural
businesses through incorporating innovation and responsible business
practices by constructing a new approach to rural businesses. Combined
keywords (“Responsible Leadership” and “Rural Business”) using a Boolean
operator were searched on the Scopus database; a total of 449 documents
were found. Finally, 66 articles were retained after limiting the articles to
the United Kingdom and English language only. Thirty-eight journals,
twenty-seven books and one conference proceeding were referred to
developing the conceptual model. The model consists of responsible
leadership as the independent variable, innovation and responsible business
as moderators, and rural business and sales growth as the dependent
variables. However, further research is required to validate the conceptual
model using quantitative research
