Examination of Studies on Environmental Transformational Leadership With Scientific Literature Review

Abstract

Most scientific studies have focused on environmental sustainability issues in the last fifteen years. Transformational leadership is one of the most researched topics in the realm of leadership science and the field of organizational behavior. Most scientific studies have focused on environmental sustainability issues in the last fifteen years. Also, environmental transformational leadership (ETL), as a subset of transformational leadership, has started gaining importance recently. Our study is aimed at reviewing the many studies already conducted in the area of ETL so far, gaps in research done, and the direction for future research based on recommendations of different authors. This study investigates the effects of sustainability awareness and the experience of managers with leadership skills on their stakeholders. In this context, ETL was selected as a leadership style to examine the effect on leadership through environmental concerns related to organizational behavior, job performance, and employee behavior in sustainable environmental awareness in organizations. Therefore, we have synthesized and analyzed published studies focusing on ETL. The forty-five published papers are the building blocks for answering our six research questions. We seek to answer the methodologies that have been used up to date and what kind of variables were used by various researchers to understand the phenomenon. Six criteria were used to limit the inclusion criteria of Systematic Literature Review (SLR) consistent with the selected method of the study. The first one of these criteria was that only Social Sciences Citation Indexed articles were examined. Then, the second criteria were determined by three international databases, namely ScienceDirect (sciencedirect.com), Business Source Ultimate (ebsco.com) and Emerald (emeraldinsight.com). The most applied website of Google Scholar (googlescholar.com) has been additionally scanned as the 3rd criterion to ensure all SSCI articles have been reviewed. The fourth criterion determined to be used three keywords as follows: transformational leadership, environmental transformational leadership, green transformational leadership in selected databases, and English as the fifth criterion for publication language. The study included scholarly articles in the publication year between 2015-2024 (Jan-March) as the last criterion. The scanning process was conducted in February and March. The writing process will be conducted in April. Our limitations were the language and the limited time frame. In the light of the study findings, the study demonstrated that there is still little research about environmental transformational leadership in the tourism industry. It is interesting to explore the impact of sustainability in the green orientation of a company, as well as the employee and customer triangle, and measure the effectiveness of its impact.