“Positive Change” in Responsible Global Leadership: Process and paradox

We adopt process thinking to develop novel theoretical insights on how to understand “positive change” on a global scale, focusing particularly on considerations about the recursive relations that link actors and environments. Our intent is to address a blind spot in the extant literature on responsible global leadership: even when considering multiple orders of “positive change”, the literature tends to capture the outward dimension (the cumulative impact out there) but not the inward one, which is the transformation in the leadership processes that happens via the experience of outward change and most importantly, via attempts to reconcile dilemmas. We fill such a void proposing possible interplays between outward and inward change.