Sustainability Leadership

The topic of sustainability has moved increasingly into the center of public awareness due to the global challenges humankind experiences today (e.g., climate change, scarcity of resources, increasing population, poverty, etc.). As a result, organizations engage in efforts to address these issues and take on responsibilities that do not only address their direct stakeholders, but society at large. This implies a new thinking about leadership skills needed by our organizational leaders – namely managing sustainability. However, so far we know rather little about sustainability leadership. This research project aims to define the concept of sustainability leadership, develop a measurement of it, showing the specific outcomes in can have on the internal workforce (e.g., employee sustainable behavior, pride in the organization, identification with the organization) and to explore ways of how to develop these leadership skills.

Principal investigator:  Steffen R. Giessner