Jocelyne Yalenios, associate professor at EM Strasbourg, oversees this new research cluster. We took the time to ask her a few questions about the creation process and upcoming projects.
Can you introduce the members of the cluster? How did the team come together?
The cluster is called "RESPONS: Responsible Leadership in Practice(s)" and focuses on the following issue: how to (re)organize organizational practices in a context of transition for ecosystem sustainability?
I chose to give it the name "RESPONS," inspired by the Latin verb "Respondere," to convey the idea of responsible leadership in organizations that involves not only practices but also people capable of responding collectively to the major contemporary challenges raised by the issue of ecosystem sustainability.
Our team is made up of nine colleagues from the research centers HuManiS and LaRGE :
- Géraldine Broye, Pauline Johannes and Vivien Lefebvre from the LaRGE research center (accounting/finance)
- Amal Jrad, Aline Pereira Pündrich and Babak Mehmanpazir from the HuManiS research center (strategy)
- Stéphano Vacher from the HuManiS research center (sales management / negotiation)
- Lovanirina Ramboarison-Lalao and Jocelyne Yalenios from the HuManiS research center (human resources and organizational theory)
Bringing together colleagues from key areas of management science who do not often have the opportunity to work together, this cluster stands out for its originality and ambition. Yet this is an essential condition if we are interested in transformation processes in the field of work and organizations.
To build our team, we took the time to get to know each other and to share our respective research topics and projects so that we could build the cluster's proposal together. In concrete terms, this meant meeting once a month for six months.
What are the cluster's main research topics?
The aim is to explore how organizational practices can contribute to the sustainability of the ecosystems in which we live, including both humans and non-humans. We want to understand why and how certain organizational practices contribute to this and how and by whom they are initiated. What are the intentional and unintentional consequences? What processes are at work? We explore all this through approaches situated at the meso and micro levels.
This project is made possible by our team, whose strength lies in the diversity of its expertise and research experience. This diversity manifests itself at different levels, through a wide variety of research themes and theoretical and methodological backgrounds.
More generally, we are interested in creating synergies that enable us to better understand the interactions between the institutional ecosystem, as a producer of incentive standards for sustainability (e.g., ESG, SDGs, etc.), organizations, and their territory. We also look at individual dynamics, whether these involve people in formal leadership positions within their organizations or engaged in sometimes leaderless collective action initiatives. These initiatives have the potential to play a decisive role in the transition to sustainability. We have included these interactions in the three research orientations that structure the RESPONS cluster:
- Practices for responsible governance
- Practices for responsible leadership in non-profit organizations
- Practices for responsible leadership: people and organizations
How will the team organize itself? How will you organize all your research areas around this topic?
It was the collective conception of the cluster that enabled us to articulate our different fields of research around the topic of responsible leadership practices and to define these three research orientations, which enable us to generate dialogue and synergy from our respective skills.
The first orientation, practices for responsible governance, focuses on exploring the socially responsible practices of companies, taking particular account of the ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance) approach. Here, our team examines how companies and organizations in general are adapting to the demands of CSR (corporate social responsibility), with implications for their internal strategies, particularly in a context of regulatory transition. We pay particular attention to unlisted companies, little investigated in the literature, where the links between CSR, governance, and finance have yet to be discovered.
The second focus, practices for responsible leadership in non-profit organizations, aims to analyze leadership within non-profit organizations, such as NGOs or social centers. Thanks to their capacity for social innovation, these organizations are crucial players in societal transformation. In our RESPONS cluster, we look at how these organizations mobilize specific resources, structure their governance, and create alliances, particularly in local initiatives such as the circular economy. The role of volunteer administrators is also a key focus of our work.
Finally, the third orientation, practices for responsible leadership: people and organizations, focuses on the evolution of sustainable leadership and people management practices, particularly with the growing adoption of robotics and artificial intelligence in the workplace. We are interested, for example, in training schemes for leaders to enhance their awareness of sustainability issues. We explore specific dimensions such as gender or diversity of functions within organizations, as well as practices promoting diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI).
These orientations are linked by a common thematic thread: the exploration and understanding of responsible practices within organizations, whether for-profit or not, and the transformation of leadership models to adapt to today's challenges.
What are the challenges and motivations behind this project?
What interests us is to better understand how organizations—via individuals, collectives, and practices—implement their responsible leadership, i.e. their capacity for innovation and transformation, to influence and contribute with others to the transition toward sustainability of the living world. The issues at stake concern the ability of organizational practices to respond to major societal challenges from an ecosystem perspective.
What are the cluster's medium- and long-term objectives?
First of all, in the short term, our regular meetings aim to support “routine” research activities linked to the RESPONS cluster, with a view to make submissions to conferences and academic journals but also to develop synergies in future projects.
In the medium term, we are planning a public event with a conference bringing together researchers and practitioners in 2025, with the ambition of institutionalizing it in the form of an annual workshop at EM Strasbourg.
In the longer term, we aim to offer thematic tracks at major national and international conferences in our respective fields and those that could accommodate a multi-disciplinary approach and to engage in dissemination activities using media such as "The Conversation" and EM Strasbourg networks.
A joint publication in the form of a book would also showcase and resonate with our team's multidisciplinary approach. The team is already highly committed and brimming with innovative ideas! I'd like to thank them all.
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions!