Sustainable leadership research: trends, conceptual foundations, and future directions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.64171/JSRD.4.2.24-31Keywords:
Sustainable Leadership, Sustainability leadership, Sustainable manager, Long-term leadership, Conceptual framework, Research trendsAbstract
Sustainable leadership is a recent paradigm of leadership that has come up as a critical issue in reaction to the mounting economic, social and environmental problems facing modern organizations. Regardless of the increasing academic focus, studies on sustainable leadership are still in a disjointed state with minimal conceptual and little synthesizing integration. To fill this gap, the research presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to conceptualize the intellectual space, study the trends in research, and synthesize the conceptual models of sustainable leadership. Basing on Scopus and Web of Science, a first set of 837 articles was found, among which 652 articles on the topic were peer-reviewed and were in English language. The analysis of the review is based on a multi-stage analytical model, involving the analysis of trends and patterns and the synthesis of concepts. Research papers that were indexed in ABDC, ABS, and FT50 were given priority to enhance the theoretical knowledge and shape future research. The results and findings indicate that there is a fast development of sustainable leadership scholarship, with a growing conceptual convergence concerning long-term orientation, stakeholder integration, and systemic thinking and ongoing theoretical fragmentation. Based on these observations, the paper suggests an organized roadmap to future research including the necessity to combine more theories and conduct multi-level analysis and empirical research in various organizational and cultural settings. The review can be useful to the literature on leadership and sustainability as it provides a formal synthesis and a research agenda that can be used to develop sustainable leadership studies.
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