Responsible leadership in intangible cultural heritage enterprises: formation, measurement, and its effect on employee intention to change occupation

Abstract

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH), as an important part of a culture, refers to all types of practices, performances, forms of expression, knowledge systems, and skills, as well as related tools, objects, artifacts, and cultural sites that are regarded as cultural heritage by various groups. ICH plays a significant role in enhancing cultural confidence, promoting social progress and international exchanges. However, most ICH enterprises are facing the problems of few leaders who can balance economic and social value creation well, low effectiveness of leaders’ leadership, and high occupational change rate of ICH employees, which further hinder the sustainable development of ICH. Therefore, promoting the sustainable development of ICH increasingly attracted scholars’ attention.
Responsible leadership is a style of leadership, which aims at achieving sustainable development of both organization and society through responsible role model and stakeholder consideration. Compared to other leadership, it attaches importance to social value creation in addition to economic value creation. Besides, it suggests building trust relationships with stakeholders to realize shared vision, which reflects its effectiveness to a wider scope of stakeholders. Also, it emphasizes leaders’ responsibilities to stakeholders, which includes being responsible for employees’ occupational development. Therefore, it can be inferred that responsible leadership may help ICH enterprises to solve the problem of sustainable development.
However, existing studies on responsible leadership have some shortcomings which hinder a better understanding of responsible leadership in ICH enterprises. For example, studies on the antecedents of responsible leadership mainly focus on leaders’ personalities. Whether external factors would trigger responsible leadership and how responsible leadership formed remains a black box, thus ICH enterprises lack theoretical reference when cultivating responsible leadership. Also, existing definitions of responsible leadership have not reached a consensus and cannot holistically reflect their core connotations. Meanwhile, existing measurement scales of responsible leadership cannot well assess its key attributes including responsible role model, stakeholder consideration, and sustainable value creation, which are evident in responsible leaders from ICH enterprises. Thus, there is a lack of effective scale to measure responsible leadership of ICH enterprises. Finaly, empirical studies have examined the effects of responsible leadership on employees’ work-related outcomes, while few of them pay attention to occupation-related outcomes. Intention to change occupation refers to an intention of transferring from the original occupation to a new occupation. So far, knowledge in terms of the relationship between responsible leadership and occupational change intention, its mechanisms, and the boundary conditions, are limited.
To fill the above gaps, three studies were carried out. Study 1 is an exploratory study based on interview data of 71 leaders in ICH enterprises. It discovered that under the triggering effects of market and institutional stress events, stakeholder recognition events, elders’ affective expression events, and leaders’ critical learning events, leaders will experience a sensemaking process of responsibility, in which leaders’ responsibility awareness, responsibility attitude, and responsibility crafting are improved sequentially. Finally, sense making of responsibility would promote responsible leadership. Study 2 developed the measurement scale of responsible leadership in ICH enterprises. The result showed that ICH responsible role model, stakeholder consideration, and sustainable value creation are more scientific and effective to measure the responsible leadership in ICH enterprises. Study 3 tested the effect of responsible leadership on employee intention to change occupation based on the social identity theory. data were collected from 272 employees of ICH enterprises in two stages. The results showed: Responsible leadership is significantly related to employee intention to change occupation; Occupational identity played the role of mediator; Family support moderates the relationship between occupational identity and intention to change occupation.
This thesis has theoretical and practical contributions. First, this thesis explores the external triggering factors of responsible leadership and its forming process, which respectively enriches and expands the existing theoretical framework of responsible leadership. Second, this thesis identifies its dimensions in ICH enterprises and develops a measurement scale for it, which deepens the conceptualization of responsible leadership. Thirdly, this thesis verifies the significant relationship between responsible leadership and employee intention to change occupation and examines the mediating effect of occupational identity and the moderating effect of family support, which enriches the outcome research on responsible leadership. Fourth, much attention has been paid to ICH tourism development, while few studies noticed the micro-level phenomenon in ICH enterprises such as leadership and employee’s occupational development. Thus, this thesis would add contributions to existing ICH research. Lastly, this thesis has practical reference value to ICH managers, ICH industrial associations, and relevant government departments.

Date of Award	13 Jul 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Nottingham
Supervisor	Pingping Fu (Supervisor) & Jim Mao (Supervisor)