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This paper critiques existing approaches to business sustainability and recommends a new course of action. This paper focuses the critique on sustainable business practices (SBP) and gaining sustainable competitive advantage (SCA), as they have increasingly been the focus of strategy and management scholars.

The relative progress in the strategy and management domains is reviewed with regard to incorporation of concepts such as sustainability, corporate social responsibility and stakeholder theory. The defense industry is explored as a paradigmatic case of inauthentic sustainability.

Findings reveal that existing constructs lack authentic sustainability, largely on account of the tendency of these discourses to privilege select stakeholders in the developed world. Strategic management research needs to evolve further to accommodate a broader, systemic and global focus that will yield authenticity in business sustainability. Mutual benefit for all stakeholders necessitates a paradigm shift in our thinking from competition to collaboration and creation.

When SBP and SCA get applied to certain industries, such as defense, they prop up a form of inauthentic sustainability. All global stakeholders must be included in sustainability frameworks, and some businesses, by their very definition, should not be sustained.

Mutual benefit for all stakeholders necessitates a paradigm shift in people’s thinking from competition to collaboration and creation. This paper suggests that Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) can provide the requisite direction for future strategy scholarship so as to overcome existing limitations with SPB and SCA.

This paper suggests that BOS can provide the requisite direction for future strategy scholarship so as to overcome existing limitations with SPB and SCA.

The purpose of this paper is to determine how task-oriented, relations-oriented and change-oriented leader behaviors are related to managerial effectiveness and subordinate job satisfaction, to identify incorrect findings in a recent meta-analysis of these relationships and to verify that leader problem solving is an important task-oriented behavior.

In total, 235 employees were surveyed to measure 11 specific behaviors used by their leader, and again two weeks later to measure the two outcome variables. Multiple regression analysis was used to assess how the leader behaviors are related to each outcome.

Task-oriented, relations-oriented and change-oriented behaviors were all related significantly to managerial effectiveness, but only relations-oriented behavior was related significantly to subordinate job satisfaction. Problem solving was the task-oriented behavior with the strongest relationship to managerial effectiveness. Recognizing was the least important relations-oriented behavior for job satisfaction.

Limitations included a convenience sample, common source data and possible effects of unmeasured situational variables. Ways to avoid these limitations in future research are suggested.

The findings can be used to improve leadership training and development for most managers.

The results support the idea that examining specific leader behaviors in addition to broad meta-categories can improve leadership theory, research and training.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the individual and joint influence of three distinct external leadership behaviors (i.e. networking, representing, and external monitoring) on workgroup performance and managerial effectiveness.

Data were gathered by surveying subordinates of 233 managers in various types of organizations.

The results of multiple regression analyses indicated that external monitoring and representing were positively related to subordinate perceptions of workgroup performance and managerial effectiveness. The effects of networking depended on a leader’s use of the other two external behaviors.

Understanding why a leader is effective in a particular context requires examining joint effects and different patterns of external behavior (Yukl, 2012). Past research on external leader behavior only examined one of the specific behaviors or examined a broadly defined behavior that included more than one of the three specific behaviors. The study provides new insight into the independent and joint effects of the three external leadership behaviors on managerial effectiveness and workgroup performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how ethical leadership and empowering leadership are related to leader‐member exchange relations (LMX), affective commitment, and leader effectiveness.

Data were collected using questionnaires filled out by 259 subordinates of public and private sector managers. Relationships among variables were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results indicated that ethical leadership and empowering leadership have positive associations with LMX, subordinate affective commitment, and perception of leader effectiveness.

This study is the first to examine the independent and joint relationships of empowering leadership and ethical leadership with leadership effectiveness and the mediating role of LMX.

Leader empathy, ethical values, and relations‐oriented behavior all appear to be relevant for effective leadership, but nobody has examined how all three variables are jointly related to leader‐member exchange quality (LMX). The purpose of this study is to examine these relationships and test a proposed model describing them.

Data were collected with a questionnaire from subordinates of leaders in several organizations, and SEM path analysis was used to test alternative models.

The results indicated that a leader's relations‐oriented behavior fully mediated the relationship between leader empathy on LMX and partially mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and LMX. Recommendations for future research to verify and extend the results were provided.

This is the first empirical study to simultaneously examine the complex relationships among these four different aspects of leadership (i.e. a skill, values, behaviors, and exchange relationship). The authors' measure of ethical leadership minimizes confounding with other constructs, which is a problem in earlier studies. The practical implication is that leader empathy and ethical leadership should be included in leadership selection and development programs.