Can Responsible Leadership Affect Work-Life Balance/Imbalance? A Study on Female Pharmacists in Egyptian Public Hospitals

As a result of the scandals in organizations like Enron, Arthur Anderson and WorldCom in addition to the 2008 global economic crisis, management scholars and practitioners have started to ask about the adequacy of current styles of leadership. Many management academic experts have realized that focusing only on maximizing shareholder profit is no longer acceptable as a sole business target. This has fostered the emergence of responsible leadership in the last 7 years as an attempt to fulfill both shareholders and stakeholders well-being. Over the past two decades there has been a growing awareness of labor market participation and feminist active lobbying, and the concept “work-life balance” has come to be considered a buzzword in both management and organization studies. Moreover, the concept has also gained a rising significance owing to its positive correlation with individual and organizational performance. This study focuses on public hospital in Menoufia province (Egypt) and investigates the effect of responsible leadership dimensions (aggregate of virtues, stakeholder involvement, model of leader’s role and principles of ethical values) on forms of work-life balance of pharmacists (time-based balance/imbalance, strain-based balance/imbalance and behavior-based balance/imbalance). Having collected and analyzed 230 questionnaire forms and used hierarchical regression analysis, the researcher found that only the aggregate of virtues is not considered a significant statistical predictor of the three forms of work-life balance/imbalance, whereas the other 3 dimensions of responsible leadership were found to be strong determinants of the 3 forms of work-life balance/imbalance.