A summarized essay summarizing the dissertation:

There is a persistent habit in leadership research: it looks up. It studies the leader — the traits, the behaviors, the decisions, the formal authority attached to the role. It is much less comfortable looking outward, toward the people who have to live inside leadership without access to the room where it is made. My dissertation starts with a different question. What happens to Responsible Leadership once it leaves theory and enters the lived experience of followers who are farthest from power?^1,2,8

Responsible Leadership (RL) has emerged in response to a more demanding world: globalization, technological disruption, weakened trust, and rising expectations that business leaders be accountable not only for performance, but for ethics, sustainability, and stakeholder impact as well. Yet the field remains conceptually fragmented, and much of its empirical work still leans toward leader behavior rather than follower experience. That leaves a basic but important question underdeveloped: how do employees actually construct a view of whether leadership is responsible?^1,2,8

That question becomes especially important in large organizations. Entry-level employees occupy the greatest hierarchical distance from the CEO. They usually do not know the chief executive personally. They experience executive leadership indirectly, through culture, policies, managerial translation, symbolic communications, organizational decisions, and the ambient story the institution tells about itself. If leadership can only be understood at close range, then much of modern organizational life sits outside the frame. If it can be understood at distance, then we need a better account of how that understanding gets made.^1,3,4

So I used a constructivist Narrative Inquiry and bounded the research within a single large organization and a single CEO. The aim was not to prove whether a leader objectively “was” responsible in any final sense, but to understand how responsibility was interpreted, narrated, and assigned by followers. The empirical setting centered on eight entry-level employees reflecting on life inside Microsoft and on their perceptions of Satya Nadella. Narrative Inquiry was especially suited to that task because it takes seriously the way people make meaning through story, memory, interpretation, and lived context.^1,5,10

The central finding is straightforward, even if its implications are not: responsible leadership is not simply received. It is constructed. More specifically, under conditions of hierarchical distance, it is constructed mainly through mediated signals rather than direct relational experience. Participants did not form their views of the CEO through recurring interpersonal contact. They formed them through strategic decisions, layoffs, reorganization, emails, town halls, keynotes, public interviews, internal artifacts, peer conversations, and managerial framing. Leadership at scale, in other words, was not merely transmitted. It was interpreted.^1,3

That matters because it challenges one of the field’s most durable habits. My study found very little cross-participant emphasis on traits in the abstract. Participants rarely described responsible leadership as a stable bundle of characteristics detached from context. They described situations, signals, contradictions, memories, and judgments. They described what the organization felt like, what the leader seemed to stand for, what the leader did not say, and what all of that meant when held next to their own values. That is a very different picture from leadership as a leader-owned possession.^1,7,8

Across the narratives, a patterned interpretive process emerged. Followers first encountered leadership signals: strategic moves, symbolic messages, structural decisions, and moments of visible silence. Those signals were then mediated through distance — through managers, skip-level leaders, peer folklore, media accounts, and organizational artifacts. After that, followers filtered what they received through identity-based interpretive lenses shaped by culture, religion, upbringing, moral philosophy, and career stage. They then weighed the meaning of those signals across distinct responsibility domains. And over time, trust was recalibrated recursively as new events either reinforced or disrupted prior interpretations. What emerged was not a single judgment, but a living process of meaning-making.^1,6,9,10

One of the clearest contributions of the study was the differentiation of responsibility into three domains. Participants implicitly sorted responsible leadership into market responsibility, organizational responsibility, and moral responsibility. Market responsibility referred to strategic competence, innovation, competitiveness, and financial stewardship. Organizational responsibility referred to culture, empowerment, internal solidarity, and whether the employee experience aligned with executive rhetoric. Moral responsibility referred to ethical clarity, justice, courage, transparency, and willingness to take principled risks. Participants did not reject any of these domains outright. What differed was the weight they gave them.^1,2,6

That distinction explains a great deal. In the data, disagreement did not primarily arise because participants had entirely different facts. It arose because they held different evaluative hierarchies. A strategic AI investment could signal responsible foresight to one employee and troubling moral compromise to another. A layoff could be read as necessary stewardship by one person and as evidence of ethical failure by another. A leader’s silence during international controversy could seem prudent, disappointing, ambiguous, or disqualifying depending on the lens brought to it. The same event entered different interpretive worlds and came out with different meanings.^1,2,6

This helps explain why responsible leadership feels so unstable in practice. Leaders sometimes imagine that disagreement comes from bad information or poor communication. My findings suggest something deeper. Followers ask not only whether a leader is effective, but effective in relation to what, at what human cost, through what kind of culture, and with what degree of alignment between professed values and lived consequences. Responsibility is not a flat category. It is a negotiated judgment across competing goods.^1,2

Trust did not simply rise or fall. It accumulated, thinned, stabilized, and recalibrated.

Trust, therefore, did not appear in the study as a fixed state. It appeared as a recursive process. Participants rarely spoke in absolutes. They used language like “time will tell” and held contradictory impressions at the same time: admiration for strategic competence alongside disappointment in moral clarity, appreciation for cultural tone alongside suspicion about structural decisions. New signals were not judged in isolation. They were interpreted through prior experience. A disruption that matched an employee’s existing concerns reinforced skepticism. A disruption that sat within an otherwise credible narrative could sometimes be tolerated. Trust did not simply rise or fall. It accumulated, thinned, stabilized, and recalibrated.^1,9,10

This recursive trust dynamic led to the dissertation’s primary theoretical extension. Lynham’s Responsible Leadership for Performance framework already offered one of the strongest systems-based accounts of responsible leadership through its emphasis on effectiveness, ethics, and endurance. My study extends that framework by inserting an interpretive processing stage between leadership signals and performance outcomes. In large organizations, responsible leadership is not experienced directly as performance logic flowing neatly through a system. It is filtered, weighted, contested, and socially reconstructed within that system. Effectiveness, ethics, and endurance are not just enacted by leaders; they are judgments followers assign through meaning-making.^1,6

That extension also advances leadership-at-a-distance theory. Prior work has argued that, where relational proximity is missing, followers rely on symbolic cues and mediated communication to judge leaders. My findings push that argument further by showing that distance is not simply symbolic. It is moral. Under conditions of hierarchical distance, moral evaluation becomes amplified. Silence takes on interpretive force. Tone becomes evidence. Managerial translation becomes part of the ethical architecture of leadership. What happens between the CEO’s intention and the employee’s experience is not background noise. It is one of the main places where leadership becomes real.^1,3,11

What happens between the CEO’s intention and the employee’s experience is not background noise. It is one of the main places where leadership becomes real.

The practical implications are substantial. Leaders in large organizations have to assume that signals will not travel intact. Messages are refracted through other people, other experiences, and other value systems. That means executive communication must be designed with interpretive awareness. Managers have to be developed not just as implementers, but as translators of meaning. Moral inflection points — layoffs, political controversies, crises, strategic pivots — require more than tactical efficiency; they require visible moral reasoning, honest acknowledgment of trade-offs, and congruence between values and action. And trust cannot be treated as a brand asset that sits in reserve. It has to be continuously re-earned.^1,6

In that sense, the dissertation is about more than responsible leadership as a subfield. It is also an argument about leadership itself. Leadership is not simply what a leader intends, claims, or symbolizes from the top of the hierarchy. It is what followers experience, remember, reinterpret, and carry forward. It is made not only in the boardroom or on the stage, but in the ongoing act of sensemaking that happens once leadership leaves the leader and enters the system.^1,7,11

Responsible leadership is not simply received. It is constructed.

That is the central claim of this work: in large organizations, responsible leadership is constructed at a distance. It emerges through signals, mediation, identity, domain weighting, disruption, and trust. If leadership research wants to understand responsibility more honestly, it has to spend less time romanticizing the leader and more time examining how leadership is actually constructed in the minds and lives of those asked to follow.^1,7,8,9