THE ROLE OF RESPONSIBLE LEADERSHIP IN RURAL BUSINESSES: A CONCEPTUAL MODEL

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