Global Leadership for Sustainability

Abstract

Given the social and environmental challenges facing all organizations, there is a need for new leadership models, methods, and tools for implementing organizational change for sustainable development. Toward that end, we review current approaches to leadership for sustainability in terms of their conceptual frameworks and extant research, which all advocate a balanced stakeholder approach to leadership to address the social and environmental issues related to sustainability and sustainable development. Then, drawing from spiritual and being-centered leadership theories, we offer a model of Global Leadership for Sustainability (GLfS) that incorporates and extends the conceptual domain beyond current approaches to leadership for sustainability. In doing so we propose that spirituality, through the qualities of self-transcendence and interconnectedness, is critical for sustainability and is foundational for GLfS. We also emphasize the importance of cultivating a Global Mindset for Sustainability, which incorporates two ethical principles—an ethic of remote moral responsibility and an ethic of care and compassion. As a result, global leaders for sustainability become more committed to moving beyond satisfying stakeholders’ demands for economic returns, toward a more sustainable, triple bottom line, balanced approach. Finally, we discuss implications for theory, research, and practice of GLfS.

The Intellectual Domains of Sustainability Leadership in SMEs

“…At their most basic, leadership practices involve key knowledge, skills, and abilities that comprise the individual-level attributes of individual leaders [50][51][52]. First, practices related to developing SL skills pertains to the cognitive antecedents of leaders, namely establishing a mindset for innovation, creating shared responsibility and passion between stakeholders, and developing the motivation towards achieving sustainable goals [8][9][10]53]. We call these innovation and relational practices.…”

“…We call these innovation and relational practices. Second, practices related to EL pertains to an embedded personal moral imperative towards protecting the environment, identifying individual and organizational levels of influence, and establishing a set of sustainable personal values and norms [24,47,53,54]. We call these ideological and moral practices.…”

“…For instance, Tideman et al [23] notes the importance of influencing, collaboration, trust and fairness between all stakeholders that create opportunities to generate sustainable and innovative solutions [25,58]. Fry and Egel [53] take this one step further and argue that leaders move beyond satisfying stakeholder demands to include a more balanced sustainable approach which is focused on the triple bottom line. ST-L leaders who base their leadership styles on individual relational skills closely correlates with relational leadership theory [61,62].…”

“…They highlight the concept of 'ecosystems' as an exchange of energy in the form of knowledge, information and competencies which is a collaborative process [59]. Achieving sustainable productivity and eco-efficiency outcomes in SMEs requires an integrated effort involving communication between various stakeholders and their communities [25], as well as buy-in from key stakeholders towards establishing sustainable goals [18,49,53]. We call this first group of network practices shared co-creation and level of connectedness (see Figure 1).…”

“…Extant scholars take a broader view of stakeholders arguing that all interest groups, par-ties, actors, claimants and institutions, who are internal or external actors, are affected by the organization's actions [45,96]. Examples include investors, boards of directors, managers, employees, customers, suppliers, competitors, the community and society at large, unions, and governments, where it is the responsibility of top management to ensure that these stakeholders are as satisfied as possible [35,53]. From an SME perspective, this is particularly relevant within supply chain networks and social cooperatives [100,101].…”