Leadership for Sustainability: Integrating Sustainable, Sustainability, and Environmental Leadership Paradigms

Sustainable leadership; Sustainability leadership; Environmental leadership; Organizational sustainability; Leadership paradigms.

1Rakesh H M
Department of MBA, Vidyavardhaka College
of Engineering, Mysuru, Email:
rakesh.hm@vvce.ac.in | ORCID 0009-00065314-5205

2Bhagyalakshmi K
Department of Management Studies, VTU
CPGS, Mysuru, India, Email:
bhagyalakshmi@vtu.ac.in | ORCID 0000-00026568-3549

3Shilpa R
Department of MBA, Maharaja Institute of
Technology Mysore, India, Email:
shilpa.2101r@gmail.com | ORCID 0009-00035873-113X

4Niveditha M U
Department of Management Studies, VTU
CPGS, Mysuru, India, Email:
nive279@gmail.com | ORCID 0000-00029445-3822

5Deepak S
Department of Management Studies, VTU
CPGS, Mysuru, India, Email:
deepu3062@gmail.com | ORCID 0000- 00021167-2107

Received:10-06-2026
Revised:14-07-2026
Accepted: 20-07-2026

European Journal of Prosthodontics and Restorative Dentistry (2026) 34 (6s), 58–68

Leadership for Sustainability: Integrating Sustainable, Sustainability, and Environmental Leadership Paradigms

Leadership plays a key role in helping organizations tackle complex environmental, social, and economic challenges, improve their resilience and competitiveness, and achieve sustainability goals. While promoting sustainable development is the goal of sustainable leadership, sustainability leadership and environmental leadership have been mainly studied separately, with a significant overlap in the concepts and lack of theoretical integration. This is a narrative review that is intended to synthesize these three leadership paradigms, explore the similarities and differences between them, and to find an integrated view towards organizational sustainability. The review incorporates current literature to understand the theoretical basis, defining features, leadership skills, and organization applications of each paradigm. The results reveal that sustainable leadership is mainly about longterm resilience and strategic direction of the organisation, sustainability leadership is about engaging stakeholders, ethical governance and systems thinking, and environmental leadership is about stewarding the environment and green innovation. However, there are common principles in all three paradigms, such as ethical decision making, collaboration, innovation and responsible resource management. They are integrated to offer an allencompassing framework that can assist sustainable organizational transformation in the various sectors. The review also covers implications for organizational leaders, human resource development, governance and decision-making oriented towards sustainability, and future research directions such as digital transformation, circular economy practices, and sustainable innovation. In sum, this review adds to the existing literature on sustainability leadership by offering an integrated conceptual view that can inform the future sustainability leadership research and practice.

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