Sustainability leadership in higher education institutions: An overview of challenges

© 2020 by the authors. Sustainability leadership entails the processes, which leaders, policymakers, and academics undertake in order to implement sustainable development policies and other initiatives within their organizations. It encompasses approaches, methods, and systemic solutions to solve problems and drive institutional policy towards a more sustainable organization. Higher Education Institutions (HEI) play a particularly important role, especially with regard to their institutional leadership role in promoting sustainable development. There is a paucity of research focusing on sustainability leadership in universities. In order to address this gap, this paper discussed the concept of sustainability leadership based on literature and empirical insights. The study aimed to understand the main characteristics of sustainability leaders at HEI and the main challenges they are confronted with. Secondary research questions involved gender issues and positive outcomes of sustainability leadership. The empirical component of the study consisted of an online-questionnaire survey performed among leaders (n = 50) froma set of universities in 29 countries. The sampling schemewas purposive, based on themembership in the Inter-University SustainableDevelopmentResearch Program(IUSDRP). The studywas explorative in nature, and the descriptive statistics were used for the analysis. Due to the purposive sampling, the participants from top management positions could be considered as experienced, and their views were assumed to be information-rich. With a self-evaluation, the respondents described their leadership style and their usual traits, with inclusive style and systemic thinking being predominant in the sample. Regarding the skills, the respondents selected the ability to innovate, to think long-term, and to manage complexity from a pre-defined set of options. Connectedness with interdisciplinarity and knowledge about organizational settings, as well as global challenges and dilemmas, were stated as important issues related to the knowledge required for being a leader. Regarding requirements for a change towards more sustainable universities' curriculum adaptation, investments in education for sustainable development (ESD), sustainable procurement, and reporting were mentioned. The study also revealed that gender issues were taken seriously among the sampled institutions, which is an encouraging trend. Challenges seen in implementing sustainability leadership are, for instance, a lack of interest by the university administration and among some members of the academic community, as well as lack of expertise and materials or resources. Based on the empirical insights, a set of measures were listed and which may be adopted in the future, so as to allow leaders of Higher Education Institutions to enhance their sustainability performance

Sustainability leadership: Conceptual foundations and research landscape

Sustainability leadership (SL) is a complex and relevant phenomenon that can contribute to several types of organisations during the process of becoming more sustainability-oriented. Over the past few years, a considerable number of publications have increased the level of knowledge in this field; however, on the other hand, it also has generated more complexity, literature dispersity and lack of complete understanding of the possible research avenues on SL. This paper aims to address this by complementing and building on previous qualitative and quantitative studies of SL by unveiling and exploring the landscape of the research field. This study differs from prior research in three main ways: (1) explores how the term SL evolved from the leadership theory, (2) explores the research streams that scholars have been conducting in the field by adopting a robust search string revised by specialists and considering a wide range of terms related to formal and informal leadership, as well as sustainability-related terms and (3) understands how the several leadership theories and styles are connected to sustainable development (SD) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, a total of 1,813 well-cited papers published in top journals that directly tackle sustainability leadership were selected. This sample was then used for the bibliometric assessment based on the co-occurrence of terms technique. The results indicate the existence of four main clusters and twelve subclusters, which can be considered research strands. In addition, this study also explores how the selected studies build on several leadership theories in order to understand how leadership aspects can contribute to SD and CSR adoption