IMPORTANCE OF SUSTAINABLE LEADERSHIP AND SUSTAINABLE LEADERSHIP PRACTICES AMONG MIDDLE-LEVEL HUNGARIAN MANAGERS

Abstract

Corporations, managers, and employees are still having difficulties comprehending the idea of sustainable leadership and identifying this concept itself is a challenge for modern businesses. A new and expanded definition of leadership that is founded on sustainability principles, sustainable leadership practices, and developing an inclusive, collaborative, and responsive leadership approach is known as sustainable leadership. A better understanding of the idea of sustainable leadership and sustainable leadership practices we conducted research among Hungarian middle level managers. Main purpose of this study is to examine the level of sustainable leadership skills of middle-level Hungarian managers in a variety of industrial sectors and which sustainable leadership practices with its subcomponents can be preferred to implement in organizations by Hungarian managers. Questionnaire method was used among 201 middle-level Hungarian managers. Findings show that there is a slight difference between non sustainable leadership skills and sustainable leadership skills among managers, general results showed that sustainable leadership scores of the Hungarian managers (3.20) stayed below non- sustainable leadership scores (3.75) that indicates Hungarian managers need to improve themselves relate to sustainable leadership skills based on applying sustainable leadership practices in organizations. Among sustainable leadership practices key performance drivers (3.69) are the most applicable sustainable leadership practices among the middle level Hungarian managers comparing to foundation practices (3.35) and higher-level practices (3.56) based on scores. Among subcomponents of the sustainable leadership practices score of managers centered leadership (3.4), employee centered leadership is the highest score (3.9), organizational profit (3.2), employee’s engagement (3.4) and lowest score is the knowledge sharing culture (2.7) among the middle level Hungarian managers.