Purpose Leaders are under increasing pressure to cultivate an engaged workforce in responsible ways, but how and when responsible leadership is related to employee work engagement remains unclear. Hence, this study aims to unfold the responsible leadership–work engagement relationship by exploring the mediating role of intrinsic corporate social responsibility (CSR) attributions and the moderating role of interactional justice. Design/methodology/approach A multiphase sample of 225 was collected from employees from the Chinese manufacturing industry. Hierarchical regression and PROCESS macro in SPSS were used to test the authors’ moderated mediation model. Findings The results demonstrate that responsible leadership is directly related to work engagement and indirectly related to it via employees' intrinsic CSR attributions. Interactional justice significantly strengthens the positive relationship between responsible leadership and intrinsic CSR attributions as well as the mediating effects of intrinsic CSR attributions. Practical implications To cultivate an engaged workforce that improves organizational effectiveness, firms and managers should facilitate responsible leadership, signal sincere motives of CSR activities and enhance fair interpersonal treatment at work. These can also be helpful in various fields (e.g. promoting public trust). Originality/value Based on social learning theory and attribution theory, this study empirically reveals the role of responsible leadership in enhancing work engagement. It sheds new light on the psychological mechanism and the boundary condition explaining how and when this linkage occurs, which advances research on responsible leadership and the individual-level analysis of CSR.

Leaders are under increasing pressure to inspire innovative endeavors in responsible ways. However, whether and how responsible leadership can fuel employee innovative behavior remains unknown. Therefore, drawing on social identity theory and social exchange theory, this study aims to investigate the psychological mechanisms underlying the responsible leadership-innovative behavior relationship. Multi-phase data were collected from 280 employees working in Chinese manufacturing firms to test the hypotheses using hierarchical regression analyses and the bootstrap method. The results reveal that responsible leadership is positively related to innovative behavior. Additionally, perceived socially responsible human resource management (HRM) and organizational pride separately and sequentially mediate the responsible leadership-innovative behavior relationship. This study empirically reveals the effectiveness of responsible leadership and sheds new light on the psychological processes through which it facilitates innovative behavior, revealing the generalizability of responsible leadership and innovative behavior in the Chinese context. Moreover, we respond to the call for incorporating leadership theory into HRM research and further advance the existing knowledge on both antecedents and outcomes of socially responsible HRM. For practical guidance, organizations are encouraged to foster innovation through investment in responsible management practices. Research limitations and implications are also discussed.

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