The Influence of Responsible Leadership on Strategic Agility: Cases from the Taiwan Hospitality Industry

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper provides both scholars and practitioners a variety of insights and implications about how responsible leadership and CSR can promote strategic agility and how these interrelated approaches need to be adopted concurrently.

The research provides a novel contribution to the discussion on responsible leadership, CSR, and strategic agility in the hospitality industry. The research provides valuable practical insights into developing strategies for sustaining hospitality businesses amidst grand challenges.

The paper adopts a qualitative and case-based method to garner detailed and context-rich information from key informants within the site organizations. The focus on quality hotels, the context of Taiwan, and the temporal focus during Covid, all add novelty to the study.

The findings add to the literature on responsible leadership, CSR, and strategic agility. It examines an interesting and under-explored context to assess the practical application of these concepts in a hospitality context to enhance the three meta-capabilities for the survival, recovery and growth of their businesses.

While generally well written, I felt that the paper would benefit from a professional proof read. This will improve both its clarity and also its eventual impact, and would thus be a valuable investment on the part of the authors.

Author Response

We appreciate very much your interest in our research and your encouraging review of our paper. Following your suggestion, we have submitted our revised manuscript to the MDPI's editing service and got the certificate. Please refer to the attached files for the certificate. Thank you very much! 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I enjoyed reading your paper and this topic sounds interesting and can be potential of publication. Issues for improvement are provided. Before resubmitting, please consider the following:

1.      The numbers of references do not in order (e.g., from [1], [2], …).

2.      Responsible leaders are responsible to cope with the crisis such as COVID-19. However, responsible leadership concept is broad. Why did the authors focus on CSR?

3.      In Section 1, what are your research questions (RQs) or research objectives (ROs)?  The authors need to develop RQs/ROs and explain why the study is needed and what are the justifications for undertaking this study.

4.      How did the authors prepare the research instrument?

5.      Table 1 showed the interview date in 2020; however, Section 3.3 was mentioned the data collection period during 2020-2021. Please justify.

6.      Table 1 showed 14 interviewees from 10 hotels; however, the authors informed the number of informants is 16. Please justify.

7.      How did the authors draw Figure 1? In addition, the authors should somehow explain this figure.

8.      There is no discussion section. Some part in Section 4 is a discussion. Please clarify whether this Section is only findings or findings and discussion. However, regarding the quality of discussion, the authors should discuss the findings with literatures more.

9.      The authors need to add managerial implication.

10.  The authors should provide the limitations and propose future research direction.

Overall, you have a good research approach. Following above suggestions would overcome deficiencies of your manuscript.

Author Response

Thank you for your interest in our work and we appreciate your encouragement as well as your thoughtful suggestions very much. We respond to your suggestions and comments point by point below:

1. The numbers of references do not in order (e.g., from [1], [2], …).

      Thank you for this reminder. We have now fixed the order of references throughout the manuscript.

2. Responsible leaders are responsible to cope with the crisis such as COVID-19. However, responsible leadership concept is broad. Why did the authors focus on CSR?

      We completely agree with you that the concept of responsible leadership is broad. We focused on CSR based on the following motivations: first, prior research has established both responsible leadership and CSR as major metrics for the sustainable performances of an organization (Székely & Knirsch 2005), and in particular, research has shown that it takes a responsible leader to transform a company into a sustainable, socially responsible enterprise. This suggests that the broad and abstract concept of responsible leadership could be viewed and evaluated through relatively concrete CSR initiatives. Second, CSR has been established as a significant factor of competitive advantage (e.g., Cader et al., 2022). This has at least two implications for the current research: 1) CSR plays an important role in coping with COVID-19 and post-pandemic recovery; 2) CSR is an important aspect of responsible leadership. We now include these points in our discussions as you suggested below in point number 8.

3. In Section 1, what are your research questions (RQs) or research objectives (ROs)?  The authors need to develop RQs/ROs and explain why the study is needed and what are the justifications for undertaking this study.

We presented our research questions and research objectives on page 2 and 4 in the original manuscript. Following your suggestion, we have now rewritten, clarified and placed them in sub-section 1.1 from page 2-3. We also provided motivation for the study in the new section 1.1. We also justified our chosen research methodology in secion 3 on page 4.  

4. How did the authors prepare the research instrument?

The COVID-19 pandemic was particularly hard on the hotel business, among other industries. Many debated on whether to temporarily suspend operations or to close permanently. However, we found that many hotels adapted quickly and even innovated to prepare for travel resurgence. Interestingly, these were the hotels that have been engaged in corporate social responsibility. After deliberation, we decided to investigate what were the underlying factors that prompted these hotels to pivot and adapt. Thus, many even thrived during the COVID outbreak. In so doing, qualitative research was utilized to explore this phenomenon. For the interview questions, our research team has specific topics for the respondents and kept the interviews semi-structured with open-ended questions. An in-depth interview’s main objective is to understand what respondents believe to be crucial information about the subject. All of the interviews were conducted in person with more than one author present and debriefing was conducted after each interview session. Based on the responsible leadership discourse, the interview questions were drafted after a review of the literature and secondary data. 

5. Table 1 showed the interview date in 2020; however, Section 3.3 was mentioned the data collection period during 2020-2021. Please justify.

Thank you for this point. We conducted interviews in 2020 and secondary empirical data collection spanned from 2020-2021. We have rewritten this part to be clearer on page 4.

6. Table 1 showed 14 interviewees from 10 hotels; however, the authors informed the number of informants is 16. Please justify.

16 was a typo. We apologize for the confusion and have now fixed the texts on page 4 section 3.3 and page 6 Section 3.5.

7. How did the authors draw Figure 1? In addition, the authors should somehow explain this figure.

Figure 1. is generated based on the responsible leadership discourse and our research findings. The unprecedented shock of the pandemic prompted businesses to realign and reprioritize stakeholder engagement. To combat the pandemic, responsible leadership is necessary since it has a profound effect on both primary and secondary stakeholders. Between the company and its stakeholders, the leader serves as a conduit. In order for businesses to act swiftly and have the ability to remain fluid, strategic agility is required so that available resources can be flexibly reallocated. Strategic agility and its meta-capabilities can be enhanced and fostered through responsible leadership. With the integration of these capabilities, organizations can strive to be even more socially responsible. Amid disruption, this process is continual, cyclical, and dynamic. We now add this section on page 11. 

8. There is no discussion section. Some part in Section 4 is a discussion. Please clarify whether this Section is only findings or findings and discussion. However, regarding the quality of discussion, the authors should discuss the findings with literatures more.

Thank you for your comment. Section 4 should be titled findings and discussions and we have changed it in this revision. We now also extend our conclusion section to include more discussions relating to literatures from page 11 to 13 section 5.1 through section 5.5.

9. The authors need to add managerial implication.

We appreciate your suggestion. We now add managerial implication as section 5.2 on page 12.

10. The authors should provide the limitations and propose future research direction.

Thank you for this point. We now add limitations and directions for future research in section 5.5 on page 13.

Overall, you have a good research approach. Following above suggestions would overcome deficiencies of your manuscript.

Thank you for your encouragement and we hope our responses above and our revision helped improve our paper. We appreciate your helpful comments.

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have done an extensive revision based on the comments. It is ok for publication. One minor comment is that the authors should improve the resolution of Figure 1 before publication.

Author Response

We have improved the resolution of Figure 1. Please refer to the attached file for the latest version. We also revise the figure in the manuscript accordingly.

If there is any revision required, please inform us. 

Thanks.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf