Modelling the Models: An Integrative Review and Conceptual Framework for Leadership in Sustainable Enterprise in Asia

Abstract

Leadership scholarship has proliferated into partially overlapping models, while sustainability research has added labels such as sustainable, responsible, green, environmentally specific and regenerative leadership. For enterprises in Asia, the central problem is not choosing among labels but identifying which influence mechanisms are viable for a particular sustainability and entrepreneurial challenge, and whether newer models add theoretical value beyond established processes. This integrative review develops a mechanism- and configuration-based framework that compares leadership models at the level of behaviors, causal processes, goals, stakeholder boundaries, system boundaries and contextual conditions. It proposes eight recurring mechanism families and embeds them in the Modelling-the-Models Leadership Configuration Cube (M²-LCC), defined by concern for people, concern for performance and responsiveness to the external environment. Regenerative leadership is positioned as a future-facing frontier of sustainability-oriented leadership because it shifts the evaluative horizon from continuity and harm reduction toward restoration, net-positive value and intergenerational socio-ecological renewal; the paper does not assume that it is universally superior or automatically mechanism-distinct. Equifinality explains why several configurations may be viable, while bounded rationality, stakeholder interpretation and configuration mobility explain selection and adjustment over time. The Leadership Model Distinctiveness Test (LMDT) distinguishes mechanism novelty from contextual, goal, stakeholder/system-boundary and temporal extensions. Asian institutional heterogeneity is treated as a boundary condition rather than a single cultural moderator. The framework generates testable propositions and an empirical agenda for SMEs, family enterprises, start-ups and sustainability-to-regeneration transitions.