Evolving a Model of Sustainable Leadership: An Ex-post Facto Research

Abstract

The cascading effects of globalization, changing business environment, economic uncertainties, technological advancements, heightened stress levels and increasing incidence of behavioural deviance have changed the workplace requiring sustainable leadership. Although there is plethora of literature on leadership, there is dearth of scholarly work on sustainable leadership as the subject is still evolving. This aroused academic curiosity and provided impetus to me to undertake this study to explore the ideology of the leaders in political and organizational contexts and study their attributes in the backdrop of extant literature on spiritual leadership and humanistic management to find answer to the question ‘does spirituo-humanistic ideology lead to sustainable leadership?’ The present research seeks to (a) study the link between secular spirituality and leadership, (b) examine attributes and behaviour of leaders of long standing in political and business contexts and (c) evolve a model of sustainable leadership for organizations with an operational definition. For a long-time spirituality and leadership were considered apart: one, a realm of intangible ideas and emotions; the other, a practical area of scientific inquiry, however, the article embraces a holistic view of secular spiritual leadership. It adopts anti-positivism paradigm (theory) focusing on qualitative analysis (Cohen et al., Research Methods in Education [5th ed.], London: Routledge Falmer, 2000). As research on sustainable leadership requires studying leadership behaviour over a period, the study adopted ex-post facto research for conducting two case studies of leaders in political and business contexts from India who provided leadership in their respective spheres for decades. Finally, the study contributes a spirituo-humanistic model of sustainable leadership for organizations.