Responsibility

The term responsibility is used in several different ways in business discourse. A primary sense of responsibility can be taken as asserting a causal connection, where we identify the critical act that led to subsequent results. Second, it may refer to role responsibility, where a leader is accountable for anything that occurs while he or she is in charge. Responsibility is also sometimes used interchangeably with the legal notion of liability, where there is an obligation for redress by the party deemed legally responsible. The term may also be used to establish a certain level of behavior, when, for example, we describe a person who engages in civic activities such as voting as a “responsible member of the community” or a business engages in corporate ...