Frontiers in Management Research

Download PDF (406.2 KB) PP. 65 - 83 Pub. Date: April 25, 2017

DOI: 10.22606/fmr.2017.12004

• David Edgar^*
  Glasgow School for Business & Society, Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland, Tel: +44(0)141 331 3180
• Estrella Bernal
  Business Management and Organization Department, University of Zaragoza, Spain, Tel: +34(0) 976 761000
• García Campayo
  Department of Psychiatry, Miguel Servet University Hospital, University of Zaragoza, Spain, Tel: +34(0)976 253621

The global economic crisis has caused governments and charities to be squeezed in term of resources to meet social and environmental needs. In parallel, social enterprises, volunteering and the “big society” have stepped in to help fill the void. However, this is a smoke screen that covers a bigger problem – the lack of true social responsibility by large corporations. Too often, mention is made of the economic crisis recovery but the crisis is greater than this, it includes social and environmental crisis which quite simply is not recovering nor is it receiving the attention it deserves. This paper explores this contention and through a literature review proposes a holistic approach to better inform business as to its responsibility and how to meet a more responsible management agenda. We propose this through a model based on responsible management and mindful leadership and provide a brief description of a case study as to how mindfulness is starting being used by an Iberian Multi-national to recast the social responsibility agenda and move towards a more responsible management approach to business. Different coaching techniques combined with Nominal Group Technique were used to identify underlying deep values of participants (CEOs). The resultant values can be used by the multinational to construct a theoretical model of responsible management and mindful leadership. One outcome of this model applied to this multinational is the current strategy being developed by the company. This strategy embeds our thinking and considering the high influence of the case multinational in its sector, we believe the use of the Responsible Management and Mindful Leadership Model will be a tool which increases the multinational´s capacity to influence crisis recovery in the true sense, considering social and environmental aspects.

Mindfulness, responsible management, CSR, social crisis

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