The interplay of sustainable leadership and organizational innovation literature review

This comprehensive literature review is aimed to examine the interplay between sustainable leadership and innovation, synthesizing current research to highlight key drivers, challenges, and future directions. Complementary analytical methods were applied to synthesize and interpret the literature including descriptive analysis, bibliometric analysis, thematic analysis and content analysis. The PRISMA framework was employed to guide the systematic screening and selection of studies between 2000 and 2024. The key findings highlight the exponential publications in sustainable leadership and innovation in recent years, top journals, dominant countries and subject areas in the field in addition to keyword co-occurrence and visualization maps of most related subjects to sustainable leadership and innovation such as management, human, climate change and business. These results show the gap in literature where many subject areas need further investigation. Results of thematic analysis indicate the most relevant topics were corporate sustainability, sustainability risk, SDGs and moral imagination which were highly frequented. Content analysis on 49 documents showed that sustainable leadership significantly influences innovation by creating a supportive culture for creativity and experimentation, promoting ethical, impactful, and resource-efficient innovations. Results also revealed that sustainable leadership influence green innovation in different industries including education, healthcare, environment, energy, transportation, manufacturing and agriculture. Finally, recent challenges confronting sustainable leadership through innovation were discussed such as balancing goals, resource scarcity, ambiguity, governmental regulations and innovation adoption. These results can guide organizations and policymakers in integrating innovation and sustainability into their strategic management.