Kind of a stretch, no?
When it’s a teen pregnancy or injuring a pedestrian, we know what “taking responsibility” means. For layoffs there are no actions, no alteration of life paths. Even the money for severance really comes out of someone else’s pockets. It means nothing for the person saying it. Everyone else suffers the consequences, not the speaker.
Claiming you’re to blame is the only penance. That only makes sense to people who won’t normally do that. Which is people who think in narcissistic personality traits are normal. IE narcissists and people they groomed.
Responsibility for a bad thing means that you are ultimately to blame, so if you take responsibility, you should either step down or present a detailed action plan. Otherwise you're saying "I messed this up and I also don't know how to fix it but I don't intend to stop being the leader"--which is (ironically) a very irresponsible stance.
In any case their actions speak louder than words. They don’t need to say they take responsibility. They’ve shown that they have. In many cases they either don’t say it at all, or it doesn’t stick with us because the actions spoke louder than words.
If it’s just words then the words are what we remember.
That said, once you’re gone it’s someone else’s problem to clean up your mess. Bailing is also antisocial behavior. Not necessarily narcissistic, but not healthy.
Nope. Not unless there are actions to backup the words. Some kind of actual sacrifice that helps actually cleanup the mess.
E.g., do the CEO & Execs give back all bonuses and substantial salary for the past X years these bad decision were made, and keep working for $1/year until they are fixed? Do the CEO & Execs personally make calls using their own personal & professional capital to find new jobs for those they are firing?
If not, it is just performative bullshirt.
Not cleaning up their messes, of course. That’s still on everybody else. They’re too busy contending with this harsh reality of not being right all the time.
Which means if anyone says they take full responsibility, they’re either saying “I’m a big fat narcissist” or that they imprinted on narcissists, so all of their mentors were.