Dr Giang Nguyen & Dr Heidi Wechtler
Newcastle Business School, University of Newcastle
Responsible Leadership for Sustainable Transformation:
From Good Intentions to Systemic Impact
Description
This short course examines why leadership that is well-intentioned, ethical, and socially motivated often fails to deliver meaningful sustainability outcomes. Drawing on contemporary research on responsible leadership and grounded empirical evidence from the tourism and agritourism sector in Vietnam, the course moves beyond normative appeals and best-practice prescriptions to explore how leadership operates as a socially embedded, multi-level process.
Participants are invited to rethink leadership not as an individual attribute or moral stance, but as a relational and contextual practice shaped by stakeholders, institutions, culture, and power dynamics. Through a series of thematic units, the course develops an evidence-informed understanding of how responsible leadership emerges, how it works through identifiable mechanisms, and why it sometimes reproduces the very problems it seeks to address. The course is designed for leaders, policymakers, educators, and practitioners engaged in sustainability-oriented change who seek to strengthen their capacity for judgment, reflexivity, and systemic thinking rather than acquire prescriptive tools.
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Content:
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Unit 1. Why Good Leadership Fails in Sustainability Contexts
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Unit 2. What Makes Leadership ‘Responsible’—and What Does Not
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Unit 3. How Responsible Leadership Actually Works
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Unit 4. Working With Stakeholders, Not Managing Them
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Unit 5. Leadership Inside Place, Culture, and Institutions​
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Unit 6. What This Means for Leaders, Policymakers, and Communities
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Overall Course Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, participants will be able to critically distinguish responsible leadership from adjacent moral leadership approaches and explain why ethical intent alone is insufficient for sustainable transformation. They will be able to analyze sustainability challenges through a multi-level lens that integrates individual action, organizational dynamics, and broader social and institutional contexts. Participants will develop the capacity to identify and interpret key mechanisms through which responsible leadership influences sustainability outcomes, including stakeholder relationships and social capital dynamics. They will also be able to recognize common failure points in sustainability-oriented leadership initiatives and reflect on the role of positionality, context, and power in shaping leadership outcomes. Finally, participants will be equipped to apply responsible leadership principles in a context-sensitive manner that acknowledges uncertainty, tension, and unintended consequences.
Unit 1. Foundation
Why Good Leadership Fails in Sustainability Contexts
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Description
This foundational unit addresses a paradox at the heart of contemporary leadership for sustainability: despite widespread awareness of environmental and social challenges, and despite the presence of leaders who are genuinely committed to “doing the right thing,” many sustainability initiatives fail, stall, or generate only symbolic change. Rather than attributing these outcomes to individual shortcomings or lack of commitment, this unit examines failure as a structural and relational phenomenon.
Drawing on responsible leadership research and reflexive qualitative evidence, the unit explores how good intentions can be constrained, redirected, or neutralized by organizational routines, stakeholder expectations, cultural norms, and institutional pressures. Participants are encouraged to move beyond simplistic success–failure narratives and to view leadership breakdowns as analytically informative moments that reveal how sustainability efforts are shaped in practice. The unit establishes a critical foundation for the course by reframing failure not as an exception, but as a central site for learning about responsible leadership.
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Learning Outcomes
By the end of this unit, participants will be able to:
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Explain why good intentions do not reliably lead to sustainability outcomes
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Identify common structural and contextual barriers to sustainability-oriented leadership
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Distinguish individual leadership intent from system-level effects
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Interpret leadership failure as a source of insight rather than individual deficit
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Recognize how norms, power, and stakeholder pressures constrain leadership action
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Reflect critically on their own assumptions about effective leadership
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Unit 2. Conceptual Clarity
What Makes Leadership ‘Responsible’—and What Does Not
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Description
This unit clarifies what responsible leadership is by first explaining what it is not. In practice, leadership for sustainability is often framed interchangeably as ethical, servant, authentic, or transformational leadership. While these approaches share important concerns with values, integrity, and people, treating them as equivalent obscures critical differences in how responsibility is understood and enacted. Building on the foundation established in Unit 1, this unit introduces responsible leadership as a distinct approach that foregrounds stakeholder relationships, accountability beyond organizational boundaries, and long-term societal consequences. Rather than adding another leadership label, the unit helps participants understand why existing moral leadership models struggle to address sustainability challenges that are systemic, contested, and politically embedded. The aim of the unit is not definitional precision for its own sake, but practical clarity. By distinguishing responsible leadership from adjacent approaches, participants gain a sharper understanding of the kinds of leadership assumptions that enable—or constrain—sustainability-oriented action.
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Learning Outcomes
By the end of this unit, participants will be able to:
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Distinguish responsible leadership from ethical, servant, authentic, and transformational leadership
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Explain why moral or values-based leadership is often insufficient for sustainability challenges
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Identify the specific focus of responsible leadership on stakeholders, accountability, and long-term impact
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Recognize how different leadership models frame responsibility in fundamentally different ways
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Assess which leadership assumptions are most visible in their own practice and organizational context
Unit 3. Mechanisms
How Responsible Leadership Actually Works
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Description
This unit moves from defining responsible leadership to explaining how it operates in practice. Rather than focusing on leader traits, styles, or personal qualities, the unit introduces responsible leadership as a set of social mechanisms that connect leadership intentions to sustainability outcomes across multiple levels.
Drawing on empirical evidence from sustainability-oriented leadership in agritourism, the unit shows that responsible leadership does not produce impact through isolated actions or charismatic influence. Instead, it works through patterned processes that embed leadership in local contexts, mobilize relationships among stakeholders, and gradually transform practices and expectations over time. Participants are introduced to a mechanism-based perspective that explains why similar leadership intentions can lead to very different outcomes depending on context, relationships, and timing. This perspective helps move beyond generic prescriptions and toward a more realistic understanding of how sustainability-oriented change unfolds.
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Learning Outcomes
By the end of this unit, participants will be able to:
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Explain responsible leadership as a set of mechanisms rather than individual traits or behaviors
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Identify key mechanisms through which responsible leadership influences sustainability outcomes
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Distinguish between leadership actions and the processes that make those actions effective or ineffective
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Analyze how leadership operates simultaneously across individual, organizational, and societal levels
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Use a mechanism-based lens to interpret variation in sustainability outcomes across contexts
Unit 4. Relational Processes
Working With Stakeholders, Not Managing Them
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Description
This unit examines responsible leadership as a relational and communicative process rather than a position of authority or control. Sustainability challenges require leaders to work with multiple stakeholders who hold different interests, values, and interpretations of what sustainability means in practice. In such contexts, leadership is exercised through ongoing interaction, negotiation, and sensemaking rather than directive decision-making. Building on the mechanisms introduced in Unit 3, this unit focuses on how responsible leadership unfolds through stakeholder relationships over time. It introduces leadership as a process of collective meaning construction, where leaders and stakeholders continuously interpret problems, negotiate responsibilities, and adjust expectations. The unit highlights why stakeholder engagement is often fragile, why misunderstandings and silences emerge, and how leadership influence depends on trust, legitimacy, and communication across boundaries. Rather than presenting stakeholder management techniques, the unit emphasizes the limits of control and the importance of process awareness in sustainability-oriented leadership.
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Learning Outcomes
By the end of this unit, participants will be able to:
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Explain leadership as a relational process embedded in stakeholder interactions
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Recognize the role of sensemaking and communication in sustainability-oriented leadership
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Identify common breakdowns in stakeholder engagement and collaboration
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Distinguish between managing stakeholders and working with stakeholders
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Interpret leadership influence as contingent on trust, legitimacy, and ongoing dialogue
Unit 5. Contexts and Systems
Leadership Inside Place, Culture, and Institutions
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Description
This unit examines how responsible leadership is shaped by the specific contexts in which it is practiced. Sustainability-oriented leadership does not operate in a vacuum; it is embedded in places, cultures, industries, and institutional arrangements that enable certain actions while constraining others. As a result, leadership approaches that appear effective in one context may fail or produce unintended consequences in another. Drawing on empirical insights from agritourism in Vietnam, the unit emphasizes that context is not a background variable but an active force in leadership processes. Cultural norms, historical trajectories, regulatory frameworks, and local power relations shape how responsibility is interpreted, who is seen as legitimate, and which sustainability goals are considered acceptable or feasible. The unit challenges the assumption that responsible leadership can be universally applied through standardized models or best practices. Instead, it develops an understanding of leadership as context-sensitive practice that requires judgment, adaptation, and attentiveness to local conditions.
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Learning Outcomes
By the end of this unit, participants will be able to:
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Explain how place, culture, and institutions shape leadership practice
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Recognize context as an active constraint and enabler of responsible leadership
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Identify risks of transferring leadership models across contexts without adaptation
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Analyze sustainability challenges as context-dependent rather than universal
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Apply responsible leadership principles with sensitivity to local conditions
Unit 6. Integration
What This Means for Leaders, Policymakers, and Communities
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Description
This final unit brings together the insights developed throughout the course to reflect on what responsible leadership can—and cannot—achieve in sustainability contexts. Rather than offering a toolkit or set of best practices, the unit emphasizes responsible leadership as an ongoing practice shaped by uncertainty, trade-offs, and unintended consequences. Drawing on the cumulative findings of the research, the unit highlights that responsible leadership does not guarantee successful sustainability outcomes. Its value lies instead in how leaders navigate tensions between competing stakeholder demands, balance short- and long-term considerations, and remain attentive to the social and institutional conditions that shape their influence.
The unit also revisits the idea of leadership failure introduced in Unit 1, reframing it as a structural and relational phenomenon rather than a personal shortcoming. By doing so, it encourages a realistic and reflexive understanding of leadership that prioritizes judgment, accountability, and learning over control and certainty.
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Learning Outcomes
By the end of this unit, participants will be able to:
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Integrate insights from across the course to interpret sustainability-oriented leadership challenges
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Recognize the limits of responsible leadership in addressing complex sustainability problems
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Distinguish between leadership influence and leadership control
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Approach sustainability leadership as an ongoing, context-dependent practice
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Reflect on responsibility as a shared and negotiated process rather than an individual burden