Sustainability Leadership and Ethical Perspectives

Abstract

The failures of leaders in the 21st century have reached crisis proportions, as evidenced by the alarming trends of “Quiet Quitting” and “The Great Resignation” (Jamali & Caldwell, 2023). Beck and Harter (2023) reported that 82% of people promoted to positions of leadership were the wrong individuals and 58% of employees in a 2018 survey indicated that they would rather trust a stranger than their boss (Damron, 2018). For organizations to reverse this trend of ineffective leadership, they must develop a sustainable leadership approach that incorporates true ethical principles (Hasan, 2022).

The purpose of this paper is to address the need for “Sustainability Leadership” in modern organizations and to emphasize the importance of ethical leadership (Stouten, Van Dijke, & De Cremer, 2012). We begin this paper by defining Sustainability Leadership (SL) and emphasizing its importance as a leadership framework. After defining SL, we then identify how SL meshes with seven different leadership perspectives. We suggest eight propositions that leaders and organizations can test related to each perspective’s contribution to SL. We conclude the paper by identifying four contributions of this paper for leaders and organizations