Toward a taxonomy and unified construct of responsibility

The academic literature provides diverse approaches to the study of the responsibility construct. We conducted a brief review of the literature from various disciplines of responsibility: morality, leadership, work design, extrarole behaviors, and education. We then proposed a taxonomy of the different conceptualizations of responsibility and conducted a lexical analysis to identify its manifestations. We next focused on individual responsibility and conducted a series of forty qualitative interviews with leaders. From the literature review and the semi-structured interviews, we propose that responsibility is a multidimensional construct with six manifestations: accountability, commitment, concern for others, dependability, initiative, and receptivity. We put forth an integrative model of the construct, along with 16 propositions that describe the relationships in the model and offer avenues for future research.