Sustainability managers as leaders. Perspectives on leadership at the front line of sustainable business development

Licentiate thesis, 2025

In response to increasing breadth and detail of reporting requirements and the broadening range of issues now included under a sustainability umbrella, companies world-wide, including companies in the construction industry, are under pressure to integrate sustainability into organizational activities. Such transition requires empowered leadership for sustainability and fundamental changes to existing business models or the creation of new models for
sustainability.

Employing a qualitative research design, the study draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with sustainability managers to critically examine the nature of sustainability leadership by focusing on the practices and perspectives of sustainability managers in the Swedish construction industry.

Guided by structuration theory, which advocates duality between agency and structure, this thesis advances the understanding of how sustainability managers’ leadership is shaped by ongoing negotiation within established structures and shifting mandates. Sustainability managers’ leadership strategies entail promoting sustainability vertically by bringing everybody on board and horizontally by reaching out to individuals in executive roles, as well as finding ambassadors who support their efforts toward raising engagement. Looking ahead, sustainability managers anticipate two non-exclusive futures for sustainability management roles: specialization and democratization. They anticipate leading increasingly specialized expert roles as qualified generalists in the specialization future. In the democratization future they anticipate their leadership to focus on facilitating the broad distribution of sustainability responsibilities across organizational actors. Furthermore, sustainability leaders reveal a spectrum of perspectives on business models for sustainability, ranging from idealistic to pragmatic and ambiguous. The findings reveal that business models for sustainability thinking remains immature among sustainability leaders. This thesis concludes that sustainability managers are still expected to be front line professionals for sustainable business development.