Title: Locating sustainable leadership within a typology of leadership in business

Authors: Errol Brandt

Addresses: School of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, NSW, Australia

Abstract: Corporate sustainability has become a topic of increasing importance for business leaders. A growing number of them are committing their organisations to corporate sustainability, a form of self-regulation which seeks to preserve social, environmental, and economic capital. This requires leaders to engage in transformational change, challenging organisational paradigms and introducing sustainable values into their organisations. Despite a considerable body of research on leadership in business, there is limited work to date on understanding the relationship between leadership and corporate sustainability. This conceptual paper begins to address this gap by exploring the concept of sustainable leadership. It proposes four types of leaders and the business context in which those leaders may be appropriate. This paper aims to locate sustainable leadership within a leadership typology which compares leadership approach with environmental beliefs. This may be used to better understand how leadership influences corporate sustainability within organisations.

Keywords: sustainable leadership; sustainable development; corporate sustainability; servant leadership; transformational leadership; questionnaire; leadership typology; ecocentricism; anthropocentricism; business leadership; social capital; environmental capital; economic capital.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIE.2016.078628

International Journal of Intelligent Enterprise, 2016 Vol.3 No.3/4, pp.190 - 204

Received: 27 Apr 2015
Accepted: 05 Aug 2015

Published online: 29 Aug 2016 *

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