The research on the green leadership: a systematic review and theoretical framework

Jie Zhong, Xiaojing Shao, Huan Xiao, Rui Yang () and Xin An
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Jie Zhong: Tsinghua University
Xiaojing Shao: Northeast Agricultural University
Huan Xiao: Nanchang University
Rui Yang: Guizhou University
Xin An: Harbin Institute of Technology

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, 2025, vol. 27, issue 1, No 12, 377-408

Abstract: Abstract Green leadership plays a growing significant role in encouraging organizations to become more environmentally friendly and to positively address environmental challenges. The studies of green leadership are booming and have the features of interdisciplinary. Given the importance of green leadership, a systematic review of this field is necessary to recognize its research status, untangle its key focuses, and identify its research gaps, so as to navigate the future studies and practice accordingly. This study collected 846 green leadership-related papers from the Web of Science database and used the bibliometric tool of CiteSpace to conduct a systematic review. On the above basis, the grounded theory was employed to construct a theoretical framework of green leadership and provide a more in-depth analysis of the key topics and concepts within this field. The research results show that compared to antecedents of green leadership styles, existing studies have mainly used empirical methods to explore its effects on financial benefits, followers’ green behavior, green attitudes, and psychological states. And, exploring the coordinated participation of stakeholders, examining green leadership’s effect on leaders from an actor perspective, investigating the down-to-up effect of followers on leaders’ environmental behaviors, carrying out cross-cultural cooperation on green leadership across regions, and exploring how green leadership is developed are the outlets in the future studies.

Keywords: Green leadership; Systematic review; Grounded theory; Theoretical framework (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s10668-023-03960-0

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