Towards a Meaningful Understanding of Organizational Leaders' Localized and Contextualized Implementation of UNSDGs in Bahrain's Changing Energy Sector Businesses

Abstract

Despite Network Leadership scholarship's emphasis on localizing and contextualizing leadership practices during organizational change, there is a dearth in the current theoretical framings on “how” to address the implementation failure of localization and contextualization towards broader SDGs/organizational sustainability. This paper fills this gap by offering deeper insightful theoretical and practical understanding of how organizational leaders can address socio-economic and ecological sustainability concerns, and how a more meaningful reconceptualization and implementation of leadership practices can help Business and Management academics and practitioners address the organizational growth, human, and ecological well-being dilemma in the energy sector. By drawing on Network Leadership, SDG, organizational change literature and 26 senior leaders' semi-structured interviews, this study uses (Braun and Clarke's 2006) Thematic Analysis Procedure to resolve the theoretical and practical implementation lag in Business and Management scholarship. We contribute 4 novel implementation practices: (1) Operational; (2) strategic; (3) cultural and (4) interorganizational knowledge exchange alignment and a model on wider socio-economic-ecological well-being. Showing ‘what’ leadership characteristics are needed and “how” to meaningfully reconceptualize the dominant localization and contextualization model of organizational change towards broader sustainability goals has been practically and scholarly overdue.