Educating responsible leaders: do they actually get the opportunities for becoming responsible?

Responsible leadership has found its way to the literature as a means of responding to the complexity and multiplicity of the modern business world (Pless & Maak, 2011). The concept and its practice have various dimensions, such as sustainability, ethics and governance and among its core and overarching values are inevitably ‘responsibility’ and ‘accountability’ (Smit, 2013). The role of management education and particularly business schools in developing responsible leaders through embedding the concept in their curriculums have been discussed in literature (e.g., Smit, 2013) and is growing in practice. This conceptual paper discusses the extent management education could go into developing a new generation of leaders who indeed value (or know how to value) ‘responsibility’ and ‘accountability’ in practice. The increasing pressures of the ranking competition on business schools, seems to have created circumstances that such values are expected from and shifted more and more towards the academic systems. The systems in turn seems to have transferred these more and more towards the academics as the forefront of the battel. In the quest for higher evaluations, NSS scores, gaining rapid results and implementing immediate changes and improvements, it seems that significance of being responsible and accountable on the student side is more and more ignored and forgotten. These raise the question of whether such values could be developed just by being exposed to the theories and academic sources for their future practice or actually should be practiced while they are still residing in academia? The limited time students spend in HE institutes in the UK before entering the real world, makes it essential to expose them to the realities and challenges of the world early on and from the first days of their studies, should we intend to develop responsible leade