Transdisciplinary Leadership for SustainabilityCharlott Hübel

6. September 2017

The inherent interrelatedness of Earth system processes in conjunction with the global scope of contemporary challenges create the necessity to adopt more holistic approaches when it comes to leading for sustainability. Business, particularly business leadership, assume a major role in responding to the identified necessity, thusly enabling sustainability transitions for society as a whole. Although in the more recent past, an increasing number of scholars has already suggested adopting holistic approaches to corporate sustainability leadership, studies still fall short in suggesting concrete means for their implementation. Responding to these inadequacies, this study puts forth a transdisciplinary framework for corporate sustainability leadership. By establishing the link between sustainability leadership and transdisciplinarity, the resulting multi-level, multi-process framework manages to engage both the mental and practical component of deep change.  An investigation of the practical relevance of the proposed framework reveals that neither holistic approaches to leadership nor transdisciplinary practices find wide-spread application in corporate sustainability management. Successful implementation seems to be contingent upon a range of factors including the organizational set-up, sources of knowledge, personal mindsets, role of relationships and underlying system structures. Due to the plurality of influential factors, practical recommendations comprise multi-level approaches, ranging from re-thinking basic societal systems and developing individual holistic mindsets to fundamentally changing organizational structures and processes of decision-making.