The objective of this paper is to study how leaders’ motivation and leadership style relate to the adoption of sustainability efforts at the strategic level and to investigate some of the implications this has for firms. We investigate the relationships between leaders’ personal motivation towards sustainability, their intellectual leadership for sustainability, and organizations’ sustainability strategies. Further, we study perceived outcomes and objective measures of financial performance influenced by firms’ incorporation of such strategies. Findings from a structural equation model of 352 Norwegian manufacturing firms showed that intellectual leadership partly mediated the relationship between leaders’ personal motivation for sustainability and their firms’ sustainability strategies, indicating that personal motivation influences firm strategy through executives’ leadership behavior. We also find strong and significant paths from firms’ sustainability strategies to perceived value creation and impact of initiatives at the organization level. Further we find small, but significant relationships between incorporation of sustainability efforts in firms’ core business strategies and objective measures of their financial performance. We discuss possible implications of this study for managers and scholars.
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