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Business leaders are increasingly responsible for the societal and environmental impacts of their actions. Yet conceptual views on responsible leadership differ in their definitions and theoretical foundations. This study attempts to reconcile these diverse views and uncover the phenomenon from a business leader's point of view. Based on rational egoism theory, this article proposes a formal mathematical model of responsible leadership that considers different types of incentives for stakeholder engagement. The analyses reveal that monetary and instrumental incentives are neither sufficient nor necessary for business leaders to consider societal and environmental stakeholder needs. Non-monetary and non-instrumental incentives, such as leaders' values and authenticity, as well as their planning horizons, counterbalance pure monetary and instrumental orientations. The model in this article complements the growing body of research on responsible leadership by reconciling its various conceptual views and providing a foundation for future theory development and testing.

Purpose Enterprising individuals are frequently portrayed as rational agents who maximize their own interests. At the same time, an increasing number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) use social responsibility strategies, incorporating collective interests into their business agenda. This study aims to analyze the interplay between the rational and emotional aspects of the entrepreneurial personal identity and address its implications for the socially responsible behavior of businesses by drawing on the literature on entrepreneurial identity, the objectivism (rational egoism) philosophical perspective and the concept of entrepreneurial passion. Design/methodology/approach A sample of 333 Russian SMEs is used to test the research hypotheses. The study follows the quantitative research strategy, wherein the main assumptions are examined based on mediation testing techniques. Findings The results suggest that entrepreneurs whose personal identities are rooted in objectivism values are less likely to foster culture of social responsibility within their firms. At the same time, their entrepreneurial passion mitigates the negative effect of objectivism on social responsiveness of the venture. Originality/value This research enhances the understanding of entrepreneurial personality and can help policymakers promote social responsibility in small and medium businesses, showing that they need to communicate effectively with SMEs’ leaders and align their policies with entrepreneurial values and beliefs.

How do business leaders make ethical decisions? Given the significant and wide-spread impact of business people's decisions on multiple constituents (e. g., customers, employees, shareholders, competitors, and suppliers), how they make decisions matters. Unethical decisions harm the decision makers themselves as well as others, whereas ethical decisions have the opposite effect. Based on data from a study on strategic decision making by 16 effective chief executive officers (and three not-soeffective ones as contrast), I propose a model for ethical decision making in business in which reasoning (conscious processing) and intuition (subconscious processing) interact through forming, recalling, and applying moral principles necessary for long-term success in business. Following the CEOs in the study, I employ a relatively new theory, rational egoism, as the substantive content of the model and argue it to be consistent with the requirements of longterm business success. Besides explaining the processes of forming and applying principles (integration by essentials and spiraling), I briefly describe rational egoism and illustrate the model with a contemporary moral dilemma of downsizing. I conclude with implications for further research and ethical decision making in business.

I assume multiple types of players--“rational egoists,” as well as “conditional cooperators” and “willing punishers”--in models of nonmarket behavior. I use an indirect evolutionary approach to explain how multiple types of players could survive and flourish in social dilemma situations. Contextual variables that enhance knowledge about past behavior assist in explaining the origin of collective action. Among the important contextual variables are types of goods, types of groups, and rules that groups use to provide and allocate goods. Finally, I reexamine a series of design principles that were derived earlier from an examination of extensive case materials.

Egoism is a complicated doctrine that has three main variants: ethical egoism, rational egoism, and psychological egoism. According to the doctrine everyone is egoist, but the difference among the three variants is the temptation of the egoist. This article is devoted to discussing the doctrine of psychological egoism in “The Phoenix” by the contemporary novelist Chika Unigwe, a Flemish author of African Origin. It was shortlisted for Women and Culture Debut Prize for the best debut novel by a female writer, and for Gerard Walschapprijs Prize 2007 for novels. The heroine of “The Phoenix,” Oge, is the center of a big circle of egoism, and she is exploited by everyone she met in the novel: the Train lady, her neighbor Lisa, her husband Gunter, the Lift Man, and finally the Pastor who caused her the biggest shock leading her to lose faith and trust in God. Falling prey to all egoists did not prevent Oge from spiritual resurrection to restore her life again.

The fields of positive psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, and goal-setting have all demonstrated that individuals can modify their beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors to improve their subjective happiness. But which ethical beliefs affect happiness positively? In comparison to ethical belief systems such as deontology, consequentialism, and altruism, rational egoism appears to be alone in suggesting that an individual’s long-term self-interest and subjective happiness is possible, desirable, and moral. Albeit an important theoretical foundation of the rational egoism philosophy, the relationship between rational egoism and subjective happiness has yet to be investigated empirically. Using (Overall and Gedeon, Business and Professional Ethics. 38:43–78, 2018) 24-item rational egoism scale, we test this relationship on a random sample of 534 full-time American workers using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). Consistent with rational egoism theory, the main contribution to knowledge of this research is finding a statistically significant relationship between rational egoism and subjective happiness. Implications for practice and areas for future study are suggested.

This article argues that the egoism of nihilists Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Dmitrii Pisarev was a significant influence on the thought of Ayn Rand. Chernyshevskii and Pisarev are usually cast as influences on Russian socialists. Rand was an unapologetic proponent of capitalism. But these differences in economic philosophy should be seen as secondary to the egoism that was primary for all three thinkers. The claim that Chernyshevskii and Pisarev may have influenced Rand is one that provides a new way to think about the historical significance of nihilism.

In this third installment of his series on key, underappreciated ideas in Ayn Rand's epistemology, the author discusses the nature of differentiation and integration as the functional essence of consciousness and applies that insight to various cognitive and noncognitive processes of awareness, with a special emphasis on logic and illogic. He offers an extended analysis of the fallacies of “Frozen Abstraction” and “False Alternative,” as well as critiques of a long-standing Objectivist conflation of falsity and contradiction and a relatively more recent Objectivist error, the fallacy of “genuine awareness.”

Woiceshyn (2011) showed that leaders who exhibit rational egoistic behaviors not only make decisions that lead to organizational success, but that these decisions are also ethical. Woiceshyn's ethical decision-making model consists of seven fundamental virtues associated with rational egoism: rationality, productiveness, justice, independence, honesty, integrity, and pride. In this paper, we define the rational egoism construct using a virtues-based ethical framework. We compare and contrast the seven virtues under rational egoism with alternative interpretations that arise under altruism, deontology, and teleology in order to further refine the construct. Based on this analysis, we conceptualize rational egoism as a Type II second-order formative model and develop a scale based on the seven underlying virtues. Through the use of partial least squares path modelling (PLS-PM), we validate this on a sample of 534 full-time American workers. We then demonstrate that this rational egoism construct has a strong, positive relationship to the transformational leadership construct. Implications for practice are discussed and areas for future study are suggested.

James Sterba argues for morality as a principled compromise between self-regarding and other-regarding reasons (Morality as Compromise) and that either egoists or altruists, who always give overriding weight to self-regarding and other-reasons, respectively, can be shown to beg the question against morality. He concludes that moral conduct is \"rationally required.\" Sterba's dialectic assumes that both egoists and altruists accept that both self-regarding and other-regarding considerations are genuine pro tanto reasons, but then hold that their respective reasons always outweigh. Against this, I argue that egoists would most plausibly deny that non-self-regarding considerations have even pro tanto weight. I argue, also, that even if both sides grant the pro tanto weight of their opponent's reasons, Sterba is mistaken in holding that only Morality as Compromise provides a \"nonquestion-begging resolution\" of what it is rational to do when self-regarding and other-regarding reasons conflict, since it might be that it is rational to act on either.It might be that the weightiest self-regarding and the weightiest other-regarding reasons in the case are both sufficient reasons for acting without either being conclusive.The essay ends with a sketch of arguments against egoism that I take to be more plausible than Sterba's. As I have argued elsewhere, what makes an agent's own welfare or her own concerns or interests normative for her simultaneously makes them normative for others as well.