Article Peer-Reviewed
Sustainable Leadership in Project Management. The Need for a New Kind of Leadership
1
EAE Business School, Calle Joaquin Costa 41, 28002 Madrid, Spain
2
Departamento de Comunicación, Facultad de Humanidades, Comunicación y Documentación, University Carlos III de Madrid, Calle Madrid, 126, 28903 Getafe, Madrid, Spain
†
These authors contributed equally to this work.
*
For correspondence.
Academic Editor:
Received: 5 July 2022 Accepted: 19 October 2022 Published: 21 October 2022
Abstract
Adopting a long-term perspective has helped companies survive in difficult times and overcome economic crises, recessions, and pandemics such as the current COVID-19. At present, the project management approach is changing from more authoritarian management models to frameworks that are based on the management of people and society. This article researches the concept of sustainable leadership in the project management profession. It evaluates the level of sustainable leadership among project managers in Spain using the Avery and Bergsteiner’s (2011) model of bees and locusts as a reference framework (Bee and Locust Sustainable Leadership Model). A qualitative study was carried out based on the analysis of the responses given by sixty-eight project managers in Spain who answered a 52-point ques-tionnaire. The findings yielded interesting results. It was found that in projects considered as temporal organizations, companies tended to employ a mixture of bee and locust’s leadership elements. Respondents recognized the importance of employee training and development, and most considered that it was essential to consider the environment when determining the organization’s commercial objectives. However, based on this study’s findings, the project management profession still has a long way to go as regards the practical implementation of sustainable leadership.
Keywords
Copyright © 2022
Bulmer et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use and distribution provided that the original work is properly cited.
Cite this Article
Bulmer, E., Riera Roca, M., & Blas, J. (2022). Sustainable Leadership in Project Management. The Need for a New Kind of Leadership. Highlights of Sustainability, 1(4), 224–232. https://doi.org/10.54175/hsustain1040016
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