Abstract
As a recent concept in leadership and organizational studies, responsible leadership is said to bring many benefits to organizations in all sectors. This statement is more theoretically grounded than empirically based, as field studies are still scarce in many sectors and industries, and even more so in nonprofit organizations. The current investigation seeks to explore the multiple relationships between responsible leadership and a number of important outcome variables in organizations, namely organization commitment and work engagement. The study further examines organizational identification as a moderating and explaining mechanism between responsible leadership and the two mentioned outcomes, in the nonprofit sector. Questionnaires from 231 employees from Portuguese nonprofit organizations were collected and analyzed with structural equation modeling, partial least squares (SEM-PLS). The results confirmed that responsible leadership is an antecedent for the three variables, and that organizational identification mediates the relationship between responsible leadership on the one hand, and organizational commitment and work engagement on the other hand. Responsible leadership provides several benefits for the understanding and management of leadership in nonprofit organizations. Thus, nonprofit organizations should be able to select, prepare, train, and develop leaders with the aim to become more responsible oriented and capable of engaging the workforce, which implies the associated need to nurture employee-relations in nonprofit organizations.