Leonel Prieto

Purpose: Amid growing global demands for environmental sustainability, understanding how responsible leadership enhances corporate environmental performance has become increasingly important. However, prior research has rarely integrated environmental strategy (ES), green work climate and green innovativeness into a single framework. The purpose of this research is to address this gap by developing and empirically testing an integrated model that examines the mediating roles of ES, green work climate and green innovativeness in the relationship between responsible leadership and corporate environmental performance. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing from stakeholder theory, the resource-based view and institutional theory, the study uses a quantitative research design with a large sample of 1,514 professionals across diverse organizations and industries in the United States. Data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Findings: The findings show that responsible leadership significantly strengthens ES and the green work climate, thereby promoting green innovativeness. These factors collectively contribute to improved corporate environmental performance. The results highlight that the influence of responsible leadership primarily operates through indirect pathways, with strong mediating effects from strategic, cultural and innovative mechanisms. Research limitations/implications: The study is limited by its cross-sectional design and reliance on self-reported data, which may restrict causal inference and introduce perceptual bias. In addition, the sample is confined to the United States, limiting generalizability across national contexts. Future research should employ longitudinal and cross-cultural designs and incorporate objective environmental performance indicators to enhance robustness. Practical implications: The findings suggest that organizations should embed responsible leadership into executive development and sustainability initiatives. Firms are encouraged to align environmental strategies with organizational values, foster a supportive green work climate and invest in innovation systems that enable employees to contribute to environmental solutions. These practices can strengthen sustainability outcomes and competitive advantage. Social implications: By demonstrating how leadership influences environmentally responsible practices, this study highlights organizations’ role in advancing broader societal sustainability goals. Strengthening responsible leadership can reduce environmental harm and improve collective well-being. Originality/value: This study contributes to the literature by offering an integrated, empirically validated framework that connects responsible leadership with corporate environmental performance through strategic, cultural and innovation-based pathways. It advances responsible leadership research by demonstrating how leadership responsibility translates into measurable sustainability outcomes, providing value to both scholars and practitioners.

Sustainability assessment has become a crucial component of public policy, urban planning, and sustainable development research. Most assessment methodologies remain predominantly outcome-oriented, evaluating community conditions while paying comparatively less attention to the governance processes through which sustainable development is pursued. This study develops Governance-Centered Sustainable Development Assessment (GCSDA), a theoretical framework that distinguishes four domains: Governance Capacity, Governance Implementation, Governance Performance, and Sustainable Development Outcomes. The Municipal Sustainable Development Governance Assessment Framework (MSDGAF) operationalizes GCSDA through longitudinal documentary analysis, evidence-based classification, process tracing, and governance maturity assessment. The framework is applied to the City of Laredo, Texas, using 468 regular City Council meetings from 2000 to 2025 and 13,259 governance observations. The findings reveal sustained institutional capacity and implementation alongside substantially less consistent evidence of organizational performance and community-level outcomes. Sensitivity analysis and longitudinal governance maturity analysis showed that the central longitudinal pattern remained stable despite marginal sampling variation. The study contributes to sustainability governance by distinguishing governmental capability and action from organizational performance and community conditions while maintaining a cautious relationship between municipal governance and outcomes influenced by broader contextual factors. It introduces a transparent and potentially transferable methodology, subject to cross-municipal validation, for longitudinal municipal research. GCSDA and MSDGAF complement outcome-centered sustainability assessment by providing a structured approach for examining how municipalities govern sustainable development over time.

The study examines the relationship between leadership and pro‐environmental behavior (PEB), synthesizing findings from 76 peer‐reviewed journal articles to explore how leadership styles influence such behavior, integrating diverse theoretical frameworks, including transformational, servant, and emerging leadership approaches, and identifying the mediating mechanisms. This study proposes a conceptual framework that captures the complex interactions between leadership, employee behaviors, and organizational sustainability, emphasizing the moderating roles of green human resources management (HRM) practices, environmental policies, and societal influences. The findings offer valuable insights for advancing theoretical understanding and practical strategies to align leadership with sustainability objectives. This research provides actionable recommendations to foster pro‐environmental behaviors, promote sustainable workplace cultures, and achieve global environmental goals by addressing existing gaps.

This study examines how perceptions of eco-friendly workplace technologies influence employees’ eco-friendly behavior across different national contexts. Integrating the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), we investigate the direct and indirect effects of employees’ perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of eco-friendly technology on their eco-friendly behavior, with community engagement mediating these relationships. PLS-SEM was used to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings show two distinct socio-technical configurations through which eco-friendly technologies promote eco-friendly behavior. In Bangladesh, eco-friendly behavior is primarily influenced by perceived usefulness, which exerts both direct and indirect effects through community engagement, reflecting a usefulness-centered, engagement-dependent system. In contrast, the United States shows a usability-centered system in which perceived ease of use is the construct primarily impacting eco-friendly behavior, while perceived usefulness influences behavior only indirectly through community engagement. Despite these differences, community engagement consistently serves as a critical mechanism linking favorable technology perceptions to eco-friendly behavior in both countries. These findings demonstrate that eco-friendly technologies enhance eco-friendly behavior through alternative socio-technical pathways across national contexts. By highlighting the importance of relationship patterns rather than isolated effects, this study advances understanding of how technological and social mechanisms jointly shape employees’ eco-friendly behavior.

Sustainability assessment has become a crucial component of public policy, urban planning, and research on sustainable development. Most assessment methodologies remain predominantly outcome-oriented, evaluating the state of sustainable development while paying relatively little attention to the governance processes through which it is pursued. This paper argues that sustainable development may be understood and evaluated as a continuous governance process rather than solely as a set of societal outcomes. This study proposes the Governance-Centered Sustainable Development Assessment as a theoretical framework for evaluating sustainable development through governance rather than solely through outcomes. The framework posits four governance domains: governance capacity, governance implementation, governance effectiveness, and sustainable development outcomes within a unified governance architecture. A standardized methodology operationalizes this perspective integrating longitudinal archival data, governance activity coding, structured evaluation worksheets, evidence hierarchies, process tracing, and a municipal sustainable development governance maturity scale. The methodology is demonstrated through a longitudinal application to a city. This research advances an ontological reconceptualization of sustainable development as a governance process; and it extends program evaluation theories to sustainability governance by providing a structured, transparent and transferable framework for evaluating municipal governance processes alongside community outcomes. These contributions shift sustainability assessment from measuring how sustainable communities are to understanding how communities govern sustainable development.

Political regimes significantly determine the ability of nations to develop in one way or another. The current crisis of democracy has prompted the following question: to what degree does democracy deliver? To answer this question, it is necessary to conduct research that investigates political regimes' performance in terms of multiple sustainable development indicators. This study examines relationships between governance, institutions, infrastructure, technology and innovation, prosperity (economic), the biophysical environment, and people (social). Using 69 development indicators from 116 countries with political regimes categorized into closed and electoral autocracies, electoral and liberal democracies, autocracies, and democracies, six model configurations were analyzed utilizing PLS‐SEM. This study substantially expands the criteria previously used for comparing political regimes, thereby empirically and comprehensively testing the performance of autocracies and democracies. Based on several patterns of relationships' strength, democracies show a slightly stronger socio‐ecological development than autocracies. However, crucial social and environmental deficits remain.

Purpose: This study aims to examine the influences of employee’s capital (e.g. economic, cultural and social) and habitus (e.g. personal and social-focused values, attitudes towards the organisation and career expectations) on quiet quitting and job security. Design/methodology/approach: A sample of 1,127 US employees from different organisations, industries, states and regions was analysed using PLS-SEM. Findings: Employee’s capital strongly influences her/his/their habitus, and her/his/their habitus strongly impacts quiet quitting. The habitus predominantly mediates the influence of capital on quiet quitting. In contrast, the direct effect of capital on job security is stronger than their mediated effects through the habitus. The impact of the habitus is stronger on quiet quitting than job security. Research limitations/implications: The research is a cross-sectional study. Future research may use, among others, multiple correspondence decision analysis, sequence analysis and network analysis. In addition, future studies may disentangle the workplace and off-workplace influences. Practical implications: As the habitus strongly influences quiet quitting, managers may positively influence attitudes and expectations. Managers may use employee positioning to target practices. However, the effects of capital on employee outcomes may limit managerial impact. Originality/value: This study derives employee perceptions about quiet quitting and job security from life-long workplace and off-workplace-lived experiences. Differential employee positioning impacts the employer–employee relationship.

This study investigates how transformational leadership impacts pro-environmental and proactive work behaviors through key employee psychological states: self-efficacy, change orientation, and positive affect. We argue that transformational leadership significantly enhances these psychological states, which can drive proactive and pro-environmental workplace behaviors. We used survey data collected via Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) from 542 full-time employees in the United States. Data analysis used Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The results confirm that transformational leadership significantly enhances self-efficacy, change orientation, and positive affect, factors that in turn promote pro-environmental work behavior. Moreover, change orientation and positive affect (but not self-efficacy) favor proactive work behavior. These findings emphasize the role of employee psychological mechanisms in translating leadership into sustainable workplace behavior. The study contributes to the leadership and sustainability literature by clarifying how internal psychological resources act as behavioral catalysts. Leaders can formulate strategies focusing on emotional and cognitive empowerment. Limitations and future research directions are also discussed.

Entrepreneurial intention research requires further examination of systemic relationships between constructs of comprehensive models that will more closely approximate the ontological realities of individuals. This research jointly examines relationships among basic individual values and constructs from the theory of planned behavior, entrepreneurial orientation, and entrepreneurial intention while accounting for multiple contextual factors. Situational factors are accounted for by random determination of mediators, examination of 23 model configurations, and use of quasi-random samples (e.g., respondents with different demographic factors from different organizations, industries, and regions) from two culturally and economically contrasting countries, the United States and India. Models were analyzed using PLS-SEM. Contrary to the “common view”—the idea that Western countries are individualistic and Asian and Latin American countries are collectivistic—individual personal focus values and passion relationships were stronger for India’s sample than for the United States. Contrary results were found for basic individual social focus values and subjective norms relationships. Results show a lack of stark disparities between the two country samples. Hence, it seems that between-country differences have been overemphasized, while more attention to context and to within-country variability is required. This study expands the entrepreneurial orientation nomological network by jointly considering basic individual values and TPB’s and EO’s constructs anteceding entrepreneurial intention and examining a large set of model configurations while accounting for multiple situational factors in two culturally and economically contrasting countries.

Sustainable Development (SD) involves multiple factors and different perspectives that are critical to individuals, organizations, regions, countries, and the world. Even though relationships among Global Competitiveness, the Macroeconomic Environment, and SD dimensions, encompassing 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), are critical, for national and global policymaking, many of these relationships have not been studied systematically nor at different aggregation levels. Therefore, this study examines the relationships among the Global Competitiveness pillars (e.g., Institutions, Infrastructure, Education, Technology, Business Sophistication, and Innovation) and the Macroeconomic Environment and the SD dimensions (Social, Economic, and Environmental) using various models. Additionally, this study examined three country clusters (very-competitive, competitive, and less competitive). The PLS-SEM analysis used 11-year data from 128 countries. The results showed variability in the relationships studied as well as differences between country clusters and countries. The findings may be applicable for policymakers in reflecting and acting on the specificity of national SD, determining SD priorities for the future, as well as reflecting and acting on integrating national SD into global SD.