Introduction

In the face of limited progress on a range of social and environmental issues, many proponents and analysts of corporate action on sustainable development issues are calling for more leadership for sustainability – a call to which this book responds (Redekop, 2010; Adams et al., 2011; Evans, 2011; Gallagher, 2012; Metcalf & Benn, 2013; Shriberg & MacDonald, 2013). Such calls for leadership reflect a desire for greater and swifter change. In that context, researchers and educators can explore what is useful knowledge to enable such change. In this chapter, we suggest that some assumptions about the meaning of the term “leadership” may hinder, not help, that process of change.

We demonstrate this limiting effect by placing the concept of leadership under the scope of an analysis based on the primacy of discourse. We draw upon Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which starts from an awareness that the abuse, dominance, and inequality of power relations can be enacted, reproduced, and, ultimately, resisted by text and talk (Fairclough, 1995). We argue that the prevailing leadership imaginary, so far from supporting the transition to a sustainable society and economy, may actually hinder it and be itself unsustainable, in the sense that it depends on the discoursal maintenance of power relations and a narrow range of organizing possibilities (Gemmil & Oakley, 1992). Further, we suggest that it may thus discourage or disable more collective, collaborative, or distributed forms of leadership, deliberation, organizing, and problem-solving (Hurlow, 2008; Denis et al., 2012). If this is the case, more of the same “leadership” will not help the goal of sustainability.

We share with Evans (2011) and Western (2008) the view that dominant paradigms of leadership are part of the cause of the current crisis of unsustainability and will develop that argument in this chapter. Therefore, precisely because we are interested in sustainability, we address leadership per se rather than limit analysis to leadership on environmental or social topics. Though scholarship in this field may be expected to focus on those persons who have responsibility for topics explicitly to do with “sustainability,” given the state of conceptual development, we think that doing so could leave untenable concepts to be imported from those who analyze and promote conventional approaches to leadership. For instance, in much of the still scarce scholarship on leadership for sustainability, some of which is cited in our opening sentence, leaders and leadership have sometimes been described in terms that emphasize exceptionalism, personal “authenticity,” an individual locus of action, and a generalized other that is the object of leadership. There is also evidence of sustainability-infused leadership development programs uncritically incorporating assumptions about leadership (see for instance Peterlin, 2016).

Even those theorists who propose to break with mainstream notions of leadership may still repeat what Bolden and Gosling (2006) call the “refrain” of the mainstream competency approach to leadership. For example, the following statement may seem at first to reflect an inclusive and collectivist approach, but on another reading, may be thought to identify leadership with a special individual who acts upon an unreflecting group: “[leadership is] a form of community praxis in which one coalesces and directs the energies of the group” (Evans, 2011, p. 2). Impressive and helpful people do exist, but with this chapter we wish to show that the prevailing discourse on leadership can limit our understanding of the potential for creating the greater change that inspires the calls for more “environmental leadership” or “leadership for sustainability.”

Therefore, rather than a detailed deconstruction of existing texts on leadership for sustainability, in this chapter we offer a broad synthesis of relevant literatures that either use, or can inform, a more critical approach, drawing on the field of “Critical Leadership Studies” (CLS). We integrate these critiques by outlining “seven unsustainabilities” of mainstream leadership thinking, and the antidotes that are relevant to sustainability. At that point we offer a definition of “sustainable leadership” and conclude by outlining some potential implications for the future of research, practice, and education.

Our definition will be purposely tentative. Rather than offer a systematic construction of a new concept of “sustainable leadership,” we are placing existing concepts of leadership in the context of dominant narratives of “managerialism” (Enteman, 1993) that limit an assessment of the potential types and locations of action on sustainability. This process of tilling the conceptual earth will allow new ideas to bloom, including those that deploy structured approaches to define “sustainable leadership” or “sustainability leadership” concepts and theories. Without such insights from CDA, attempts at rigorous concept development in the organizational sciences (Podsakoff et al., 2016) may be limited by assumptions that reflect dominant discourse.

While we are reticent to suggest that it is unnecessary to focus on the behavior of senior role holders, such as chief executives or politicians, we argue that the assumptions that leadership is theirs alone to express and that leadership by special individuals is the most salient matter in organizational or social change are both unhelpful and yet widely promoted, with major implications for sustainable development.

Defining Leadership and Sustainability

“Sustainability” is often used as a shorthand for the term Sustainable Development. Since the adoption of the Brundtland Report by the UN General Assembly in 1987, “sustainable development” has been promoted by many as an integrated way to address diverse dilemmas, such as poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, disease, discrimination, environmental degradation, crime, conflict, and limited human rights or justice (WCED, 1987). That “sustainable development” seems to offer all good things to all people has been one reason for its popularity and, some say, a reason for it leading to largely ineffectual activities on those dilemmas (Perez-Carmona, 2013).

Such an “ambiguous compromise” (Purvis & Grainger, 2004, p. 6) has proven to be a resilient one. The adoption of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations in 2015 marks a renewed interest in the hope that governments, cities, firms, and other organizations can achieve progress on social and economic factors while not degrading the environment.

In this chapter, we term the sustainability issues that people are working on as shared “dilemmas,” rather than challenges or problems, to reflect both their complexity and a growing worldview that no longer regards them as problems to solve but situations to cope with. We call them “shared” because they involve collective causation, affect the many (albeit differentially), and will need collective action to address or adapt to them.

Just as the terms “sustainability” and “sustainable development” are deployed in quite different contexts and with different implied exclusions and inclusions, so the word “leadership” is used to mean or imply quite different things (Jackson & Parry, 2008) while seeming to represent a common, monolithic, understanding. Unpacking such usages may not have direct value in deliberation or action, but can help prepare the ground for people to navigate the plurality of possibilities for leadership and sustainability. Among the many definitions of leadership in management studies, we will use the following to begin our discussion: “Leadership is any behavior that has the effect of helping groups of people achieve something that the majority of them are pleased with and which [observers] assess as significant and what they would not have otherwise achieved” (Bendell & Little, 2015, p. 15).

The notion of leadership being a behavior rather than a position of authority is inherent in this definition. In addition, it reflects the relational quality of leadership so that acts need to be welcomed by a majority of those in a group. Moreover, the external observer plays a key role when categorising acts as leadership. Specifically:

Leadership involves the ascription of significance to an act by us, the observer, where significance usually involves our assumptions or propositions about values and theories of change. If our theory of change is that the CEO has freedom of action and can impose change, then we would naturally look for leadership to be exhibited at that level. If our values are that profit-maximising for shareholders in the near term is a good goal, then we would not question a CEO’s “leadership” in achieving such goals. We should note that these are rather big “Ifs.”

(ibid.)

Utilizing this definition allows us to break free from some of the mainstream assumptions in management and leadership scholarship and training, including the idea that leadership is a individualistic quality. In this chapter, we explore how deep the criticisms go and the implications for enabling action on sustainable development.

Insights from Critical Leadership Studies

While mainstream approaches to leadership and management continue to permeate academic and practitioner interest, the last decade has seen a counter-trend of scholars who seek to unpack what they consider unhelpful assumptions and directions in “mainstream” approaches to leadership. While it is difficult to summarize all of the work conducted in this field, Collinson notes that the aim of Critical Leadership Studies (CLS) is to investigate “what is neglected, absent or deficient in mainstream leadership research” (2011, p. 181). This involves understanding and exposing the negative consequences of leadership by examining patterns of power and domination enabled by overly hierarchical social relations, questioning these “exclusionary and privileged” discourses, and investigating the problematic effects that this has on organizational functioning and individual well-being (Ford, 2010).

“Critical Theory” has a significant part to play here – a motivation toward emancipatory projects and empowering grassroots and oppressed groups against dominant discourses promoted by elites. Such research challenges the field of management and leadership that may be distorted in favor of capital and the owners of capital, gender exclusion and other forms of social violence, and unsustainable forms of commerce and industry (Blunt & Jones, 1996; Nkomo, 2011). A key theme in such work is the critique of a set of ideas called “Managerialism,” which value professional managers and their forms of analysis, authority, and control, and their tendency to bring ever more aspects of life into the orbit of management (Enteman, 1993; Parker, 2002). There are parallels here with some critiques of international “development” that influence approaches to sustainability, which we will return to below. Before that, we next summarize some of the main elements of the critique made by CLS – converging around a problematization of an overly individualistic understanding of leadership. We then outline some implications for leadership scholarship and leadership development work that is motivated by concern for various shared dilemmas.

The Individualist Mistake

Mainstream approaches to leadership are keenly focussed on the development of permanent, stable, and hierarchically positioned individuals, rather than to the development of collective, relational, or dialogical leadership. Leaders are routinely described as needing to be authentic, visionary, driven, and emotionally intelligent. The image of the leader that emerges from what Gosling and Bolden (2006) call the “repeating refrain” of leadership competencies is of a deracinated superman (or, in a feminized variant that emphasizes collaboration, intuition, and nurturing, a superwoman). This “hero-focus” has received criticism over the past 15 years from mainstream management literature (Palus et al., 2012). However, even explicitly “post-heroic” or egalitarian accounts of leadership as bottom-up or, variously, as distributed (Woods et al., 2004), transformational (Bass, 1998), or “servant” (Greenleaf, 1977) may not fully address the degree to which these ideas are undermined by lingering positional metaphors of hierarchy, or by their failure to address questions of gender or, worse, are co-opted by hierarchical, instrumentalist managerialism (Fletcher, 2004). The CLS analysis of the implicit hero focus of leadership studies provides a deeper critique in at least four key areas.

First, the “dark side” of leadership practice is a key interest. Thus, various CLS theorists have explored issues such as domination, conformity, abuse of power, blind commitment, over-dependence, and seduction (Khoo & Burch, 2007; Schyns & Schilling, 2013; Sheard et al., 2013). They have coined terms including “toxic leadership” (Benson & Hogan, 2008; Lipman-Blumen, 2006); “destructive leadership” (Einarsen et al., 2007); “leadership derailment” (Tepper, 2000); and, “aversive leadership” (Bligh et al., 2007). Other scholars have discovered tendencies for narcissism and psychopathy amongst senior role holders and how that can be encouraged by popular discourses about leaders being special and powerful (de Vries & Miller, 1985; Gudmundsson & Southey, 2011). Evans (2011) characterizes the prevailing model as “exploitive leadership” and argues that such masculinized, hierarchical leadership reproduces the domination of nature by humanity. For scholars interested in the social dimension of sustainability, including matters of fairness, rights, and well-being, these dark sides will be of concern.

Rather than responding through a deepened critique, mainstream leadership scholars proclaim problems can be solved through mitigating qualities like humility, authenticity, emotional intelligence, or self-knowledge, while leaving unchallenged the assumption that “leaders” pursue exclusively corporate goals by largely instrumental means (Kouzes & Posner, 2003). Characteristically, this literature keeps up the search for an ideal trait description of the leader: lists of qualities, propensities, behaviors and habits proliferate, often including “character” and “authenticity” (Gardner et al., 2011).

The second turn in CLS aims in part to reveal the flaws of this traits focus, and of secondary efforts to promote values and authenticity among leaders. We do not have space here to rehearse this argument in detail, but in summary: leadership trait lists tend merely to describe competent human beings, emphasizing, for example, honesty and intelligence (Zingheim et al., 1996). The effort to identify traits might itself be seen as serving the very bureaucratic impulse to which leadership, with its implied freedom of moral action, is the remedy. The reliability, stability, and predictive value of trait descriptions are all in any case contested. The most telling critique of traits suggests that their pursuit is a circular process in which socially constructed discourses of leadership are interrogated from within the constraining assumptions of those same discourses (Burr, 1995). Indeed, it is not unreasonable to argue that leadership is idiographic, episodic, and situationally inflected, to the extent that no imaginable set of descriptors could apply to all potential leaders (Fairhurst & Grant, 2010). Traits are, from this view, not internal personal structures but “social processes realised on the site of the personal” (Gergen, 1994, p. 210).

Rather than focusing directly on traits, another response has been to help senior individuals to reflect upon, clarify, articulate, and live by their most important values, and, ostensibly, to help legitimize values-based behavior in professional life. Courses under the heading “Authentic Leadership” pursue that aim. Executives are encouraged to seek coherence between their life story and their seeking or holding a senior organizational role; and congruence between their thoughts and deeds (George, et al., 2007). Potential benefits may include greater self-confidence, appearing more authentic in one’s job, enhanced oratorical skill and higher levels of motivation from colleagues (Gardner et al., 2011). Typically, participants in authentic leadership programs are offered opportunities for systematic self-exploration; these processes, however, could be characterized as opportunities for self-justification, as exploration of self is framed by the aim of constructing narratives that explain one’s right to seniority within a corporation – an almost “divine” right to lead. Self-realizations that might undermine one’s ability to work for certain firms, or transform the basis of one’s self-worth, or challenge one’s assumption of self-efficacy, do not appear to be encouraged (Bendell & Little, 2015). For scholars interested in transforming organizations so they reduce their harm on the environment and society, or increase their positive contributions, the exploration of values in authentic leadership may seem like a start, but it could be unhelpfully limited.

Indeed, insights from critical sociology are ignored or obscured in Authentic Leadership scholarship and action, as is commentary on how our perspectives and sense of self are shaped by language and discourse (Fairclough, 1995; Gergen, 1994). Such insights challenge the view that we can achieve depths of “self-awareness” by reflecting on our experiences and feelings without the benefit of perspectives from social theory. Authentic leadership builds on assumptions about the nature of the individual, including the assumption that our worth comes from our distinctiveness.¹ Adorno (1973) argues that this idea of authenticity is characteristic of a nostalgic post-Christian impulse to replace the “authority of the absolute” (such as a God) with “absolutized authority” (whether that is from an organization, law, or the rectitude of a leader).

A third set of analyses shows how a focus on a leader’s values, charisma, and other attributes serves to distract from and de-problematize issues of the legitimacy, or not, of power-wielding roles in organizations and societies. When we consider leadership, we are considering how groups of people decide how to act: addressing ancient questions of socio-political organization with diverse intellectual traditions. They are investigated today in fields of political philosophy, public policy studies, civil society studies, and international development studies. We cannot delve into these areas in this chapter, but note that a recurring theme is that matters of decision making involve reflection on processes that support the rights, dignity, and contribution of all individuals in groups. Yet studies of leadership often render unproblematic modes of decision making and patterns of power (see Gemmill & Oakley, 1992; Western, 2008). Given that good governance is such a central question for Sustainable Development, this subtle sidelining of questions of accountable governance is a concern.

A fourth set of analyses in CLS revolves around questioning the “romance” of leadership – whereby mainstream perspectives ignore contextual factors and disproportionately attribute responsibility for outcomes to individuals occupying hierarchical positions. Psychological research since the 1980s has demonstrated that people, across cultures, tend to exaggerate the significance of the actions of individuals when compared to other factors shaping outcomes (Meindl et al., 1985). This concludes that we are susceptible to seeing “leadership” when it isn’t necessarily there or important – a collectively constructed “romantic discourse.” Their work reflects the “false attribution effect,” widely reported by social psychologists, as people’s tendency to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics to explain someone’s behavior, rather than considering external factors (Jones & Harris, 1967). Perhaps our susceptibility to this effect arises because we are brought up with stories of great leaders shaping history, and this myth is perpetuated in our business media (Bendell & Little, 2015).

Furthering this line of inquiry, leadership itself has also been framed as a “social myth” – one which creates and reinforces the illusion that individual leaders are in control of events and organizational performance (Gemmill & Oakley, 1992). That is, the existence and valorization of leaders serves to repress uncomfortable needs, emotions, and wishes that emerge when people work collaboratively (Gastil, 1994; Gemmill, 1986); and subsequently, individuals are able to project their worries and anxieties onto individual leaders, who are seen as omniscient and all-powerful. Members therefore perceive themselves as free from anxiety, fears, struggles, and the responsibility of autonomy (Bion, 1961), but also induce their own learned helplessness and passivity: that is, they “willingly submit themselves to spoon feeding, preferring safe and easy security to the possible pains and uncertainty of learning by their own effort and mistakes” (Gemmill & Oakley, 1992, p. 98). For Gemmill and Oakley therefore, leadership – in the form widely assumed today – is dangerous and inherently unsustainable, leading to infantilization and mass deskilling. They stress the need to denaturalize taken-for-granted assumptions in order to develop new theories of leadership that “reskill” organizational members, encourage collaborative working environments, and do not rely on superhuman individuals.

Similar commentary has been made by other theorists. For example, Ashforth (1994) argues that authoritative leaders often engage in behaviors such as belittling of followers, self-aggrandizement, coercive conflict resolution, unnecessary punishments, and the undermining of organizational goals. Schilling (2009) and Higgs (2009) reported that leaders often exhibit behaviors that aim at obtaining purely personal (not organizational) goals, and may inflict damage on others through abuses of power. Finally, a number of theorists (Conger, 1990; Padilla et al., 2007) proposed that the behavior of “followers” may also contribute to destructive practices – especially in regard to self-esteem issues, the playing of power games, and treating the leader as an idol.² As many scholars of sustainability in general, and “leadership for sustainability” in particular, are interested in enhancing change, these disempowering effects of dominant assumptions about leadership should be a concern.

Taken together, the four CLS critiques outlined above converge around challenging a form of “methodological individualism” – where single individuals are seen to bear extraordinary powers (Basu, 2008). Their research has shown how focusing on an individual leader can enforce an acontextual and short-termist view; one which pays little attention to broader socio-economic processes, planetary concerns, or collective well-being. While differences exist between the aims and objectives of the critical scholars cited thus far, at the heart of these debates is the notion that a reliance on overly hierarchical conceptualizations of leadership may have problematic impacts on organizational effectiveness, well-being, and broader social change: they are irreconcilable with creating sustainable societies (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012; Evans, 2011; Sutherland et al., 2014; Western, 2008). That is, for all their focus on attempting to achieve economically effective outcomes, hierarchical conceptions of leadership fail to acknowledge the importance of long-term socially sustainable, efficacious, and humane relationships between and among organizational actors.

Assuming Purpose

Inherent in our discussions so far is the idea that a focus on consequentialism runs strong throughout mainstream leadership discourse. That is, it is taken as natural that the primary purpose of organizations is to achieve economic goals, rather than goals associated with equity, democracy, and environmental sustainability (Jackson & Parry, 2008). A review of the assumed outcomes of leadership within 25 years showed that all types of outcome exist within an instrumentalist and consequentialist approach that concerns improving organizational performance, rather than considering the purpose of the organization, the performance issue concerned, or the impact on stakeholders (Hiller, et al., 2011). This mainstream corporate view is typically expressed in “econophonic” and “potensiphonic” terms – the taken-for-granted language that prioritizes economic outcomes over all others and potency, power, and performance over other human modalities (Giacalone & Promislo, 2013). There has been little room for doubt and reflection on the purpose of business, work, and economic progress within that leadership discourse. Thus, the challenging of econophonic and potensiphonic language in leadership studies can be an emancipatory activity, and key to nurturing “reciprocal, sustaining relationships among people and between humans and nature” (Evans, 2011, p. 2).

Some theorists demand that we see this issue through an imperialist economic context – pointing toward the idea that under modern capitalist society, centralization, hierarchy, domination, exploitation, manipulation, oppression, and scapegoating are inherent features of life (Barker, 1997; Bhabha, 1994). If this is the context for one’s analysis, then the “social myth” of leadership can be regarded as one of many nodal points in a discoursal web of ideas and practices whose effect is to infantilize and prepare mass audiences for compliance in their own exploitation. Indeed, despite our earlier criticisms of the assumptions and approaches within “authentic leadership,” its focus on self-development could provide an opening for work on the deeper personal transformations that might allow for different types of purpose to be clarified and pursued through leadership acts.³ In addition, the importance of purpose to leadership is receiving greater attention from leadership scholars, without that purpose being assumed to be congruent with narrowly defined corporate goals (Kempster, et al., 2011). Growing interest in sustainability leadership or sustainable leadership can be seen in that context: an effort to plug the purpose gap in contemporary corporate life. A business rationale for corporate leaders to be clear on a purpose beyond narrow corporate goals is also developing, with some researchers arguing that firms with a clear public purpose do better financially over the longer term (Big Innovation Centre, 2016).

However, the concept of sustainability that emerges through these initiatives is often limited and problematic – as we will discuss below. Therefore, unless the interest in purposeful business and purposeful leadership allows for a deeper exploration of sustainability than that which aligns simply with existing corporate interests, it is unlikely to address this limitation to mainstream leadership approaches.

Beyond Critical Analysis

In order to counteract the various problems generated through mainstream leadership discourse, some CLS scholars have pointed toward the value of a more emergent, episodic, and collective understanding of leadership – involving acts that go beyond the realm of single individuals, and toward a more pluralistic practice (Bendell & Little, 2015; Western, 2008). Indeed, in recent years the term “collective leadership” has emerged as “an umbrella concept that includes studies … applying the core insight of relationality to the key problems in [organization and society. … Relationality reveals the individual as a node where multiple relationships intersect: people are relational beings” (Ospina & Foldy, 2015, p. 492). Some use the term to include distributed, shared, and co-leadership, due to an assessment that they all focus more on complex relations between individuals. Research on “distributed leadership,” for example, has shown how leadership actors can emerge anywhere in an organization and leadership becomes a cultural trope around which motivated action accretes, a position supported theoretically by sensemaking theory (Weick, 1995), activity theory (Bedny, et al., 2000), communities of practice theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and practice theory (Nicolini, 2012). Ospina and Foldy continue by noting:

Collective leadership shifts attention from formal leaders and their influence on followers to the relational processes that produce leadership in a group, organization or system. Relationality motivates attention to the embeddedness of the leader–follower relationship in a broader system of relationships and to the meaning-making, communicative and organizing processes that help define and constitute these relationships.

(2015, p. 492)

Further than this, various scholars note the potential of more collective forms of leadership as a “sustainable” organizational practice, given that it allows for empowerment, reduces alienation, and increases democracy and participation (Evans, 2011; Western, 2008).

Understood like this, it may seem that more distributed forms of leadership could remedy the problems raised by CLS scholars in regard to mainstream discourse. However, many recommendations described as “collective leadership” nevertheless retain a reliance on special individuals as leaders, whether by role or by act. In addition, some studies have found that “collective leadership” is used rhetorically by managers who pursue individual aims within inefficient bureaucracies (Davis & Jones, 2014). For example, when it is presented as a practice that mitigates hierarchical power, especially in business organizations, distributed leadership sometimes becomes little more than a way of rhetorically extending employees’ freedom of action (and weight of responsibility) while maintaining circumscriptive rules (Dainty, et al., 2005). Thus, we conclude that the absence of a critical framework to deconstruct assumptions about leaders, goals, and legitimacy can hamper post-heroic and distributed forms of leadership. It is the more radical approaches within the collective leadership field, particularly concerning the nonprofit sector, that resonate with the insights of CLS and could therefore be used in a new conception, theory, and practice of sustainable leadership.

Implications for Sustainable Leadership

Thus far, we have noted how Critical Discourse Analysis can reveal and denaturalize limiting assumptions in the field of leadership, and in what follows we demonstrate how it can also aid the field of Sustainable Development. As described earlier, Sustainable Development and its related activities became established in the late 1980s, when offered as a coherent agenda for governments around the post-Cold War world. It also coincided with the rise of another idea for public policy, called New Public Management (NPM), which regarded citizens as users of services and incorporated practices from the private sector (Schachter, 2014). Looking back, NPM and its closely related tropes of leadership and entrepreneurialism can be seen to have colonized the process of sustainability, reducing it to a problem that can be solved by individualistic leadership in a process dominated by capital (Bessant, et al., 2015; Perez-Carmona, 2013; Steurer, 2007). Intentional or not, this colonization was aided by the growth of voluntary corporate engagement with sustainability that then influenced the understandings of policy makers, experts, and campaigners on how to approach social and environmental problems (Ball & Bebbington, 2008). A counter process was also occurring with the transfer of concepts of environmentalists and social justice campaigners into the private sector, thus leading to what Anderson & Mungal (2015) describe, albeit in a different sector, as the inter-sectoral transfer of discourses.

CDA invites us to question how a phrase can ideologically encourage certain perspectives and not others – including “collocation.” The term “Sustainable Development” is a collocation; that is, two words that are likely to co-occur with greater than average frequency. Most collocations (“two peas in a pod”) are unproblematic, but when both terms are in any way contested, or liable to hypostatization, each word can have the effect of de-problematizing the other, thus doubling and redoubling the potential ideological loading of the phrase. One risk is that important questions of what is development is displaced by a focus instead on what might be distinctly “sustainable.” Thus, when considering sustainability, we should attempt to uncover assumptions about development, including assumptions about “social” progress. There is a long tradition of this fundamental questioning of progress in the anti-development or post-development fields, which typically argue that the development concept is an extension of colonialist and imperialist power relations in the global economy (Sachs, 2015; Rahnema & Bawtree, 1997). These critical perspectives need to be drawn upon in the future, for “sustainable leadership” to be a rigorously developed concept and a meaningful practice (Bendell et al., forthcoming).

In order to illuminate the insights from CLS, and make them more accessible for future research and practice, we have developed a synthesis of seven main “unsustainabilities” in mainstream leadership. We hope this will prepare the conceptual ground for the development of new approaches to sustainable leadership research, practice, and education.

The Seven Unsustainabilities of Leadership

However, we recognize that critique alone is not a sufficient contribution. Western (2008: 21), for example, suggests that “critical theorists must go beyond identifying ‘bad leadership practice’ and aim to create and support successful ethical frameworks for leadership,” and Sutherland et al. argue that attention should be paid to understanding “how organizational alternatives to mainstream understandings of leadership might be constituted” (2014, p. 16). Therefore, we can flip the seven criticisms into the following seven recommendations for more sustainable leadership:

Seven Recommendations for More Sustainable Leadership

While the above recommendations relate to leadership more generally, we stress the importance of going beyond the narrow focus on individual leaders’ abilities, skills, attributes, and behaviors, and toward developing all organizational actors’ critical thinking skills (Brookfield, 1987), and creating spaces in which to discuss future possibilities for sustainability (Evans, 2011). In social studies, we appreciate how theoretical development can take many forms and does not require making predictions based on a theory (Abend, 2008). Instead, our contribution is providing a framework for interpretation of claims about leadership for sustainability. Affecting people by revealing limiting assumptions embedded in leadership discourse has been documented in areas beyond sustainability (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012). Therefore, our work has practical implication in that synthesizing critiques and making them available to people and scholars engaged in sustainability may reduce the influence of limiting concepts. We limit our predictions to this process of consciousness-raising. We contend that professionals who avoid the seven unsustainabilities of leadership will enable more positive (or less negative) change; that organizations will witness more positive (or less negative) change; and designers or commissioners of leadership development will encourage more effective change-enabling capabilities from their participants.

At this point we can offer a tentative definition of “sustainable leadership”: Sustainable leadership is any ethical behavior that has the intention and effect of helping groups of people address shared dilemmas in significant ways not otherwise achieved.

Our conceptualization of sustainable leadership includes the seven necessary conditions (Podsakoff et al., 2016). First, that leadership involves a behavior, or act, which can also include an intentional non-action. Second, that the act is ethical according to a framework held by the person and capable of being understood by observers. Third, that the behavior helps groups of people achieve something. Fourth, that the achievement relates to addressing shared dilemmas, such as economic, social, environmental, or cultural problems that affect many people. Fifth, that the change is significant according to both the group affected and the observers, including people who wish to describe leadership, like ourselves. This recognizes the subjective nature of ascribing leadership. Sixth, that the behavior created an effect that was additional, whereby if it had not occurred, then the outcome would not likely have been achieved. We recognize this element is based on our theories of change and is a difficult element to assess. Seventh, that the person exhibiting the behavior intended to pursue positive change on the dilemma. We hope that the definition of sustainable leadership serves to remind us that leadership is about change involving acts rather than positional power, sustainability is about dilemmas that might not be solved, that both intention and effect are important to consider, and that the significance of acts will be attributed by observers based on their own values and assumptions.

Conclusions

Throughout this chapter, we have argued that prevalent notions of these concepts can be unhelpful to practitioner and/or researcher engagement with the shared dilemmas of our time. We have drawn upon sociologically-informed critiques of leadership and sustainability and explained how the idea of leadership, as a myth of potent individual action, has been deployed in the service of unsustainable growth and exploitation. Those who suggest that the world needs leadership in the transition to a just and sustainable world must ask whether or not the leadership they imagine is the product of wishful thinking fed by an infantilizing managerial dispositif (Gemmill & Oakley, 1992). Instead, we have argued that the idea of leadership must be disentangled in its discoursal function in the service of oppression before it can be reconfigured as a modality of democracy and placed in the service of justice and sustainability. We integrated and summarized these critiques by stating Seven Unsustainabilities of Leadership and therefore made seven recommendations for more sustainable leadership. We choose the term sustainable leadership due to it emphasizing that dominant notions of leadership are unsustainable as well as our current planetary predicament.

Notes

1    Vedic philosophies provide critiques of, and explanations for, why we might enjoy a process of self-construction via self-reflection exercises. An emphasis on the “authentic self” might be regarded as an effort to find a “rock of safety against the cosmic and the infinite” (Aurobindo, 1972, p. 229). Aurobindo further argues that an aspect of our consciousness is “not concerned with self-knowledge but with self-affirmation, desire, ego. It is therefore constantly acting on mind to build for it a mental structure of apparent self that will serve these purposes; our mind is persuaded to present to us and to others a partly fictitious representative figure of ourselves which supports our self-affirmation, justifies our desires and actions, nourishes our ego” (ibid.).

2    We must note that many scholars assume the word “follower” as little more than the inverse of the word “leader,” a form of hypostatization that tends to support the naturalization of hierarchy, rather than its questioning.

3    It is worthy of note that authentic leadership and other approaches that focus on values have begun to be criticized from another perspective altogether: that they don’t help managers’ careers (Pfeffer, 2015). Such criticisms may provoke more debate in mainstream scholarship but are not aligned with the deeper questioning of purpose we explore here.

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