Responsible Leadership and Organizational Commitment among Physicians: Can Inclusive Diversity Climate Enhance the Relationship?

Abstract

As a result of the attention paid to the concept of ethics over the past decade, responsible leadership has come to be a focus of research interest for management scholars. The concept entails the degree of stakeholder engagement besides the sense of societal obligation organizations have to fulfill. The growing concept also assumes that focusing only on maximizing shareholder profit is no longer acceptable in the global business and economic sphere. That is why the concept has found a place in management literature as mentioned. Over the past four decades, organizational commitment has come to be considered a buzzword in both management and organization studies. The concept was developed in 1960 to assess employee emotional attachment to their workplace, and currently its scope has been extended to include all employee-employer relationships. The importance of the concept stems from its strong correlation with many wanted and unwanted workplace behaviors like absenteeism, turnover, performance levels, citizenship behaviors and justice as proved by many quantitative studies. This study focused on Kasr El Eini hospital (Egypt) and identified the effect of responsible leadership on physicians’ affective, continuance and normative commitment through mediating the role of an inclusive diversity climate by conducting a quantitative study. Upon collecting 140 questionnaire forms and using chi-square analysis followed by multiple regressions, it appears that responsible leadership has a positive association with an inclusive diversity climate, an inclusive diversity climate has a positive association with physicians’ organizational commitment and finally, responsible leadership affects physicians’ organizational commitment through mediating the role of an inclusive diversity climate.