Current studies on how a sustainability leadership theory can influence the practice of SMEs, such as a context of community-based social enterprises, is still lacking, with scanty research to date. These small enterprises in the bottom of the pyramid settings are indeed the important socio-economic backbone of many nations around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has significantly hit all sectors and has adversely impacted them. Our study aims to broaden the limited scholarly knowledge and advance the developing SL theory in this realm. Hence, our critical research inquiries address: (1) What are the essential sustainable leadership practices and sustainability competencies for sustainability and resilience in a CBSE context? (2) How can a CBSE business apply the theoretical frameworks in practice to survive and thrive for sustainable futures, especially during the COVID-19 era? This study employs an integrative theoretical examination of sustainable leadership frameworks and sustainability leadership competencies to investigate the sustainable business practices in the SME sector, particularly in a community-based social enterprise context. Our business case centers on a green, social enterprise, which is an award-winner of Best Responsible Tourism and is located in a small coastal fishing village of Thailand. Using a case study research method, the multi-data collection methods include in-depth interviews and focus groups with multiple stakeholders. Evidence was found to comply with six-category sustainable leadership practices and five essential sustainability leadership competencies to varying degrees. The findings suggest that sustainable leaders and entrepreneurs should develop and integrate the value-based practices and competencies (i.e., strategic, systems thinking, interpersonal, anticipatory, ethical competencies) in business. The critical sustainable practices include enabling human capital with care for stakeholders, fostering ethical values and norms via altruism, cultivating social capital through social innovation, and supporting pro-environmental behavior and social responsibility to achieve inclusive growth, sustainability and resilience. The research results advance the theoretical development of the interconnected fields of sustainability leadership and sustainable entrepreneurship. An alternative sustainable business model for sustainability and resilience is also proposed. Overall, the insightful findings can provide practical advice and beneficial policy implications for sustainable futures.

The rise of sustainable development as a field of applied research has been observed across a wide range of disciplines. Successful change towards sustainability in organizations and societies requires leadership to provide a vision, set direction, and motivate people to move towards new goals. Thus, sustainable leadership is emerging as a new domain of study within the field of management. This review of research employed science mapping tools to examine 952 Scopus-indexed documents explicitly concerned with sustainable leadership. The goals of the review were to document the size, growth trajectory, and geographic distribution of this literature, identify key journals, authors, and documents, analyze the intellectual structure of this knowledge base, and highlight emerging topics. The review documented a modest-sized knowledge base of recent vintage, concentrated in Western developed societies but global in scope. Six Schools of Thought were identified within this knowledge base, one of which—Sustainable Leadership—was singled out for attention. As the first bibliometric review of research on sustainable leadership, this review provides a reference for scholars entering this domain, as well as guidance with respect to high value frameworks, foci for future research, and practical implications.

Many managers and researchers alike are asking: What does an enterprise need to do to generate a proper balance between economic, social, and ecological objectives while gaining superior corporate financial performance, resilience, and sustainability? Several leadership concepts for enhancing organizational sustainability have emerged in recent years, but none provides an integrative approach, with the exception of Sustainable Leadership (SL). However, empirical research examining the effects of various SL practices on financial performance and other business outcomes is lacking. This article addresses this gap by empirically investigating the relationships between 23 SL practices and financial performance. Using a cross-sectional survey, data stem from 439 managers in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Thailand. Of the 23 SL practices in SL, 16 were significantly associated with corporate financial performance. Four SL practices, in particular—amicable labor relations, valuing employees, social responsibility, plus strong and shared vision—were significant drivers, and positive predictors, of enhanced long-term firm performance. Lastly, implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.

Since the mid-2010s, the circular economy has emerged as a key conceptual lever in corporate efforts to achieve greater environmental sustainability. Corporations have increasingly drawn upon the circular economy perspective in efforts to rethink sustainable supply chain management practices. This new corporate approach to sustainable supply chain management is evident in an emerging literature that has yet to be fully documented. In this systematic review of research, bibliometric methods were applied to a database of 709 Scopus-indexed documents. Author co-citation analysis identified four schools of thought comprising the intellectual structure of this literature: Sustainable Production and Environmental Management, Sustainable Supply Chain Management, Reverse Supply Chain Management, and Circular Economy. Synthesis of these themes suggests that the adoption of a circular economy perspective is transforming sustainable supply chain management in two important ways. First, this perspective reorients supply chain management away from a narrow focus on efficiency and waste reduction and towards a new paradigm of redesign, reuse, and product transformation. Second, adoption of the circular economy highlights and leverages reverse cycles in the supply chain. Thus, circular economy business models enable supply chain management to enhance corporate contributions to sustainable production and consumption. Drawing upon this framing of supply chain management within a circular economy, the review proposes a new framework for accelerating corporate sustainability.

Over the past 30 years, scholars have been calling for modern management theory and research to consider how strategic management tools could be applied to enhance corporate sustainability. While strategic management for sustainability has emerged as a multidisciplinary field, the existing knowledge base has yet to be systematic reviewed. This paper responded to the literature gap by conducting a bibliometric review of strategic management for sustainability. The paper aimed to document the landscape and composition of this literature through the analysis of 988 relevant Scopus-indexed documents. Data analyses found that the strategic management for sustainability knowledge base remained an emergent field with increasing interests from diverse groups of international scholars in various fields, particularly in environmental science, engineering, and strategic business management. Over the past three decades, the literatures have been continuously grown from a few publications in the early 1990s to almost 1000 documents to date. The review found that the most influential journals and authors of this knowledge base were international in scope but predominately from Western developed countries. Five Schools of Thought from author co-citation analysis revealed the intellectual clustering composition of the knowledge base on strategic management for sustainability: corporate sustainability strategy, sustainable waste management, strategic sustainability systems, strategic sustainability management and entrepreneurship, and sustainability assessment strategy. Key topics addressed in this research include the distribution of documents across the most highly cited journals, reflecting the breadth, quality and influential scholars in the strategic management for sustainability knowledge domain, naming of the influential scholars in the field and identification of contemporary foci and research front in the existing literature through the keyword co-occurrence analysis and co-word map. The strategic management for sustainability field has evolved from the key topics related to the green movement at the policy-driven macro level (i.e., ecological or environmental protection/impact, water/waste management and natural resource conservation) to the practicality in organizations with the topics related to social strategic responsibility and business management issues (i.e., corporate strategy, project management, supply chain management, information management, adaptive management, corporate sustainability). In addition to a retrospective, insightful prospective interpretation, practical implication, limitations and future research direction are discussed.