Organizational Sustainability Challenges Through Different Leadership Styles

Authors

  • Tadeja Sumrak Vegelj

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37886/ruo.2025.005

Keywords:

sustainability, leadership style, transformational style

Abstract

Research Question (RQ): Which leadership styles are most often exposed when establishing sustainable practices?

Purpose: The main purpose of the research is to review the existing literature on leadership styles, that can be attributed to elements of sustainability and to highlight research on the correlation of between leadership styles and sustainable management theory.

Method: The methodological approach was based on the initial findings, starting  and foreign literature and articles published in accessible databases (Scopus, ProQuest, Science Direct, Web of Science) and Slovenian university repositories. Searching management", "governance", "leadership", in Slovenian language, and "sustainability", "corporate leadership" and "leadership" in English.

Results: The analysed articles demonstrate the exposure of the transformational leadership style as sustainable and provide key elements that are characteristic of such leaders and that can also be identified in the recently emerging theory of sustainable leadership.

Organization: The research will provide managers with insights into the key competencies of their leadership to ensure sustainable practices in the organization.

Society: The implementation and identification of key competences of leaders and leadership styles also has a positive impact on employees and other stakeholders on society in general, as the application of the highlighted styles and competences would bring about an increase in knowledge and awareness of care for the environment and society.

Originality: Due to the emphasis on embedding sustainable practices in the organization in correlation with the leadership style, the originality of the research will increase the transparency of the of the theses explored so far and will lay the foundations for further research.

Limitations/Future Research: The limitations of the research carried out are seen in the relative the small amount of literature reviewed and published that would cover the actual implementation of sustainable development towards stakeholders, and therefore we focused on findings on the impact of integrated sustainability factors. Suggestion for further research is towards empirical validation of the findings on key competences leadership style to establish a strong sustainable business development.

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Published

2026-08-11

Issue

Section

Original Review Paper

How to Cite

Organizational Sustainability Challenges Through Different Leadership Styles . (2026). Journal of Universal Excellence, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.37886/ruo.2025.005