The power of a stewardship mind: Reorienting organizations around the duty to care to better address grand challenges

Abstract The present article presents an integrative review related to stewardship in all the business and management disciplines, from its initial development in 1980 to the present. Specifically, we applied a latent Dirichlet allocation‐based topic modelling analysis to almost 1200 articles, seeking to creatively synthesize the concept of stewardship around the two recurring building blocks of the psychological contract defined in the literature: the duty to care and the related psychological currencies. From this foundation, we propose the novel concept of the stewardship mind : a way of thinking characterized by the intention to be credible and consistent in fulfilling a duty to care of something of value, motivated by a certain degree of ideological currency. We articulate this concept further by providing a taxonomy of stewardship minds, ranging from mainly instrumental to mainly ideological. This taxonomy may help inspire managers to integrate stewardship into their daily actions and communications. In fact, we advance that a genuine stewardship mind has the most potential to tackle grand societal and environmental challenges. We also discuss an array of avenues for future research.