Fostering followership: sustainability leadership in practice

Other conference contribution, 2026

The dominant approach to studying leadership is to focus on leaders’ personality, behavior and attitudes, leaders’ traits and attributes, as well as
leadership styles and competences. These studies tend to assume that leader agency is absolute, resulting in other organizational actors being attributed much less agentic potential. To accelerate sustainability transition, sustainability leaders need to engage in forms of collaboration that strengthen both their own agency and the agency of others. Leadership as a continuous process of developing and sustaining the identity of the leader while also shaping
and supporting the identities of followers, is thus inherently embedded in social, organizational and temporal contexts. This paper adopts an individual level of analysis and investigates the legitimization of sustainability managers’ role as sustainability leaders to other organizational actors. Data was
collected from 25 semi-structured interviews with sustainability professionals, all with managerial responsibilities, in architecture (2), construction (10), consultancy (7), and real estate (6). The results indicate that fostering followership for sustainability can be understood as a recursive process in which relational engagement, developmental work, and credibility continuously reinforce one another over time. This processual pattern gives empirical substance to claims that sustainability transitions depend on ongoing organizational transformations rather than isolated interventions. It also helps explain why sustainability managers describe their work in terms of planting seeds, following up, and staying persistent even when resistance, uncertainty, or fatigue arise. Such accounts suggest that sustainability leadership is not organized solely around decisive events, but around continuously repeated efforts to shift how people interpret their roles and responsibilities in regard to sustainability