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Organizations are currently striving to become more sustainable, as resources dwindle and social desirability for sustainability increases. This is important in public sector organizations as well as private, and exemplars are needed. Therefore, this chapter provides a description of how a public housing authority in pursuit of a social mission parlayed an energy performance contract into a triple bottom line sustainability journey. The Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority's (CMHA) sustainability journey has been shaped most significantly by the commitment of CMHA leadership to collaboration (internal and external) as a core strategy. The chapter provides a rich description of CMHA's emergent partnerships with various organizations in their environment; focusing first on energy and later encompassing social, ecological, and economic sustainability. It describes and analyzes the leadership that emerged which played an essential role in supporting the complexity of increasing collaborative involvement. New theories of leadership, most specifically Complexity Leadership Theory (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2008), emergent leadership (Goldstein et al., 2010), and adaptive leadership (Heifetz, 1994) are used to make sense of the leadership philosophy and actions that worked in the sustainability journey.

This chapter explores sustainable development of leadership strategies as a social framework in higher education to help with defining, implementing, and envisioning a sustainable future. Leaders need to develop a sustainable approach for higher education that involves all stakeholders who benefit from having educated citizens to develop common interests that develop and promote sustainable objectives that focus on shared values. An educationally sustainable approach extends beyond a current leader’s time at the institution to continue stable growth and long-term approaches around making decisions, fostering systemic innovation, developing an engaged workforce, and providing quality services and solutions. Leaders need to link sustainable strategies to the school’s mission, values, and finances to help gain consensus and align the decision-making process. In an effort to develop leaders and programs around educational sustainability, governmental organizations have been established to help develop policies and programs to create a sustainable future. Additionally, professional organizations have formed that allow leaders a chance to connect, grow skills, and lead sustainability initiatives. And, higher education institutions have created offices focused around sustainability on campus and educational programs around sustainability leadership to help develop future leaders that are able to take action based on sustainability values and creating an inclusive and reflective process for decision-making. Sustainable leadership has the power to transform society through reorienting the educational system to help people develop knowledge, skills, values, and behaviors for an ever-changing world.

Despite the centrality of leadership to the successful transformation of universities toward sustainability, the literature on the role and practices of sustainability leadership in higher education remains poorly developed. To address this gap, this study aims to develop a conceptual model of sustainability leadership in higher education.

The study adopts the scoping review method to review, critique and synthesize relevant literature.

The resulting model of sustainability leadership in higher education proposes that sustainability leadership in higher education has the potential to transform university practices through reorientation and stewardship of the institutional mission and strengthening the commitment of stakeholders. Sustainability leadership has the potential to create a positive effect on a balanced set of performance indicators, as well as contributing to institutional and societal resilience in the longer term.

Sustainability leadership in higher education should be given prominence in its own right due to the unique organizational context of universities. This study synthesized the current discourse on sustainability leadership in higher education and its distinct attributes toward sustainable development.

This study aims to develop a framework that examines how different leadership styles influence talent management (TM) and how these leadership styles and TM influence firms’ sustainable performance considering the moderating role of environmental dynamism.

To achieve these objectives, an empirical survey was conducted among 480 participant firms in Greece. Hierarchical regression was performed to test the hypotheses.

This study reveals the significance of authoritative and transformational leadership on TM. The results also show the positive effect of talent development on sustainability. Moreover, entrepreneurial leadership is found to be the most influential style for economic sustainability, whereas transformational and transactional leaderships are the most influential leadership styles for social and environmental sustainability performance.

The data was collected at only one point in time, while sustainability is a continuous process. Moreover, only four leadership styles were addressed.

Proper leadership style should be selected to facilitate different sustainability dimensions. Talent development is a valuable investment toward sustainable performance of firms.

This study contributes to the upper echelon theory, identifying whether and how different leadership styles affect TM and sustainability. The study also advances the human recourse development literature by critically reviewing and identifying the influence of TM on firms’ sustainable performance. Moreover, the role of environmental dynamism is revealed on all the above relationships.

This review aims to identify the intellectual structure or key theoretical themes that comprise the emerging field of sustainability leadership in higher education.

The Scopus index was used to identify 180 documents published sustainable leadership in higher education published between 1998 and 2021. Author co-citation analysis in VOSviewer software was used to address the research question driving this inquiry.

This review found that the intellectual structure of scholarship on sustainability leadership in higher education is composed of four dominant “schools of thought”. These included sustainability leadership, managing campus greening, managing change and system integration, and education for sustainable development.

The findings suggest a need for more theorizing and empirical studies that explore the nature and effects of sustainability leadership in higher education. Particular attention should be given to how features of universities as organizations shape the requirements for and constraints on leadership. From a practical perspective, the findings highlight key domains of policy and practice that higher education leaders can target in efforts to enhance sustainability in their universities and societies.

The bibliometric review offers empirically-based insights into the evolution and current status of the literature on sustainability leadership in higher education. The findings can be used as a benchmark against which future developments in this knowledge base can be assessed.

This paper aims to investigate the roles of leadership in enabling sustainability transformation of universities and higher sustainability management education. It advocates research into the role of leadership for a university’s sustainability transformation by exploring interactions between university members and institutional contexts.

Using a case study approach, this study explores the sustainability transformation of a university and its influence on the MBA Sustainability Management by applying Mintzberg’s leadership framework.

The findings suggest that leaders can strongly influence a process of change in mindsets, practices and curricula to incorporate sustainability into higher business education institutions. Whereas bottom-up leadership initiatives are crucial, leadership support from top management is seen as important to enable larger, more radical steps of transformation.

It is worthy noting that in the medium run strategic leadership to develop good sustainability management education programs requires a consistent institutional commitment for sustainability.

Distributed leadership has been reported in the literature as an effective management approach for educational organizations such as institutions of higher education. This study aims to investigate the role of distributed leadership in the promotion of sustainability in an Israeli college of teacher education.

Based on the Multi-Level Model of Leadership Practice in higher education, taken from Bolden et al. (2008a) and from Woods et al. (2004), the authors investigated how the characteristics of distributed leadership are expressed in three central organization-wide structures in the college (a student group, the green council and a professional development program). They also explored in what ways aspects of distributed leadership promote sustainability-oriented activities on campus. They used a deductive and inductive interpretive approach in this case study.

The authors found three organization-level processes that are based on the principles of distributed leadership and that promote sustainability on campus: distributed leadership enables change in the organization’s internal culture with respect to mainstreaming sustainability; distributed leadership encourages collaboration between the entire campus population and between different departments and distributed leadership on campus enables the development of diverse “bottom-up” and “top-down” structures in the organization.

While the study’s findings indicated several challenges regarding the implementation of distributed leadership in the organization, they ultimately support the idea that distributed leadership may contribute to the long-term, organization-wide implementation of sustainability in higher education institutes. Therefore, the authors recommend that institutions that are willing to promote sustainability adopt distributed leadership as their major management approach.

The implementation of sustainability-related policies at universities has been marked by a greater sense of urgency in recent years. Despite this emerging trend, it is still unclear which leadership processes, at which levels and which theoretical concepts encourage sustainable transitions within universities.

This study aims to offer a systematic literature review of the existing literature on sustainability-related leadership processes, levels and theories that encourage the transformation of universities, aimed at providing guidance on this topic; uncovering gaps in the literature; and finding new paths for future research.

Leadership processes in the context of sustainability-related transitions have been approached in a rather fragmented way in the literature, and the scientific field would benefit from more in-depth and longitudinal studies. In total, this study identifies 95 processes that are related to 17 aspects of universities’ transitions.

The various leadership levels are involved in transition processes at different stages. The theories of distributed and sustainability leadership seem to be the most frequently used theories in the literature.

Structuring and defining leadership processes, levels and theories can lead to a better understanding of the dynamics of the transition process and, in a broader sense, of the process of sustainability integration in higher education. A better knowledge of how such a transition develops could contribute to the enhancement of existing sustainable development strategy and policy.

By focusing on an underresearched topic through a theoretical perspective of leadership theories, this study contributes to literature pertaining to leadership levels and processes involved in sustainability transitions of universities.

Sustainable construction project delivery should be supported by committed and inspirational leadership, with a clear understanding of the sustainability challenge. Construction organizations need intra-organizational leadership that provides the collective vision, strategy and direction towards the shared common goal of a sustainable future. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of intra-organizational leadership within UK construction organizations charged with the promotion of sustainability practices.

The study adopts a mixed method approach with qualitative data collected through semi-structured interview with 15 leaders, followed by an industry-wide survey of 200 intra-organizational leaders in contractor and consultant organizations in the UK construction industry.

The analysis of the data revealed that, the most important role of intra-organizational leadership in promoting sustainable construction practices is to formulate policies, implement procedures and disseminate best practices throughout the organization .

Nothing has been written on intra-organizational leadership role in promoting sustainability practices in the construction industry. Although leadership and sustainability has been widely covered as separate issues this study provides the empirical evidence of the link between leadership and sustainability in construction.

The purpose of this paper is to prepare the conceptual groundwork for the future study of leadership for sustainable development. The paper demonstrates the relevance of Critical Leadership Studies to future research on sustainable development policies and practices. A critical approach is also applied to concepts of sustainable development, with three paradigms of thought described.

The approach taken is an extensive literature review in fields of leadership and sustainable development, with a focus on some of the broad assumptions and assertions in those literatures.

A key finding is that leadership studies drawing from critical social theory can provide important insights into future research and education on leadership for sustainability. This literature shows that some assumptions about leadership may hinder opportunities for social or organisational change by reducing the analysis of factors in change or reducing the agency of those not deemed to be leading. These limitations are summarised as “seven unsustainabilities” of mainstream leadership research.

The paper calls for the emerging field of sustainable leadership to develop an understanding of significant individual action that includes collective, emergent and episodic dimensions. The paper then summarises key aspects of the papers in this special issue on leadership for sustainability.

The implications for practice are that efforts to promote organisational contributions to sustainable development should not uncritically draw upon mainstream approaches to leadership or the training of leaders.

The authors consider this the first paper to provide a synthesis of insights from Critical Leadership Studies for research in sustainability.