How Leadership Advances Sustainable Development Across Industries: Systematic Evidence From Organizational Green Transitions

Abstract

Sustainability of the environment has gained new status as a prime international agenda, and the challenge is to find the kind of leadership that can transform organizations and the industry as a whole. This paper uses a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) based on the PRISMA model to investigate the role of leadership styles in green transitions across sectors. Using strict inclusion and exclusion criteria, 70 peer‐reviewed empirical studies from 2014 to 2024 were reviewed. Results reveal strong evidence that transformational, ethical, and sustainable leadership has a positive impact on environmental innovation, employee engagement, and corporate accountability. Leadership effectiveness is also influenced by governance mechanisms and regulatory stability, whose interplay with organizational and institutional settings is understudied. A bibliometric mapping of research clusters and citation networks is generated using VOSviewer. Although the literature defines leadership as a key facilitator of green transitions, it remains disjointed in its treatment of cause‐and‐effect, sector‐specific, and time‐based dynamics. In this review, existing knowledge is synthesized and gaps in the theoretical and empirical literature are identified to advance a more robust, constructive, and explanatory research agenda on sustainability leadership.