The challenges in a new leadership era are great, and what is also required is normative research. Leaders themselves need guidance, not only by learning what others are doing, but also by being challenged to consider what responsible strategic leadership should, and could look like.
Human capital may be built by accident or naturally, as well as by design. The experiential learning cycle (Kolb 1984) suggests that knowledge is created and reshaped through reflecting on individual experience. The process of reflection is seen to facilitate the development of sets of potential solutions in the individual’s long-term memory that can be drawn upon to help comprehend new and difficult problem situations (Cheetham & Chivers 1998), thereby contributing to the employee capability component of human capital.
According to Nutt and Backoff (1996), strategic leadership emphasises the central role of leadership in ensuring successful change endeavours. By concentrating on the organisation as an entity, the strategic leadership of an organisation is therefore primarily responsible for initiating, implementing and managing organisational change.
It is evident that leading change in organisations has significant implications for social capital, which may be seen as a great facilitator of
34 Management Today | January 2012
change, or alternatively as a great hindrance.
During the last few decades, there has been intense debate about the role of business in society and calling into question the traditional assumption articulated by Friedman (1962) that the role of business should be limited to business activity or economic interests (e.g. Hood, 1996; Zohar & Marshall, 2004) and arguing that business at least has some form of moral obligation to engage in solving social problems, or alternatively that it is in their best interest to do so (Jackson, Farndale & Kakabadse, 2003; Zohar & Marshall, 2004). The concept of sustainability relates to the maintenance and enhancement of environmental, social and economic resources, in order to meet the needs of current and future generations (Gilbert, Stevenson, Girardet & Stren, 1996).
This paper has examined the social dimension of strategic leadership, focusing specifically on the role of strategic leaders in developing social capital and utilising it for organisational
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