Filling empty vessels: accountability, responsibility, and corporate leadership

Purpose This paper seeks to identify a rounded understanding of two fuzzy terms in wide but muddled use in guiding corporate leadership: accountability and responsibility. Both have deep resonance discussions of strategy and corporate affairs, but their often-confused meanings both inform actions and impede understanding. Each has normative implications for the practice of corporate governance, and yet each, like an empty vessel,[1] leaves practitioners with an unhappy sense of knowing they have a use but not knowing what to do with them. Design/methodology/approach This essay examines the varied uses of these terms in academic literature and practitioner discussions, exploring their conflicting meanings through lenses of philosophy, literary writing, and management studies to show how each, in their flux, overlap and diverge. Findings The article analyses themes obscured by these muddy waters and clarifies them by speculating on how their ambiguity demands reflexive, thoughtful action and interaction between the parties in absence of clear hierarchy of command or greater authority. How meaningful that interaction is questionable, when the words are so full of meanings without an iterative process of understanding. Originality/value Given the prevalence of the ambiguities is usage, clarifying terms is not a realistic option. Instead, this essay proposes that insofar as these concepts reflect abilities, they represent our ability to embrace their ambiguity in a philosophically pragmatic way, and in so doing be able to act accountably and responsibly.