Sustainable International Management: Research in Global Culture and Leadership Development

Organizations are directing increasing attention towards corporate sustainability due to the regulative requests, the expectations of stakeholders and the greater community, environmental pressure, and the benefits of maximizing the firms’ performance. With the intensification of globalization, sustainability no longer remains an issue inside each organization but becomes a collective concern that also involves its overseas suppliers and customers. As a multidimensional construct, it is worth investigating sustainability from different perspectives in this global cultural context. Prior studies have investigated sustainability from culture, human resource management, boardroom nationality, boardroom gender diversity, corporate identity, organizational capabilities, measurements to corporate sustainability performance, challenges in achieving sustainability, and so forth.

With the 17 sustainable development goals and the pressure from government, competitors, and customers, organizations are paying more attention to incorporating social and environmental practices into daily work. As a multidimensional construct, a considerable body of literature has found some antecedents and consequences in relation to sustainability. Stemming from the previous research, the goal of this Special Issue is to offer new insights and future perspectives on the way in which sustainability is managed in the business context, how informal institutions and formal institutions may interplay together and affect the corporate sustainability performance, and the role of leadership in shaping corporate sustainability policies and practices. This Special Issue contains a collection of four papers dealing with several topics related to these themes. The authors of these contributions expand the existing literature in this field by offering new insights and future perspectives.

In the first contribution, Karakose et al. [1] provided a review of scientific articles that address the topics of management, leadership, and administration in relation to COVID-19. The sample is composed of 246 most-cited articles that are published in the academic journals in the Web of Science from January 2020 to April 2021. Based on the bibliometric analysis, the authors identified the current research status and future research trends on management, leadership, and administration issues related to COVID-19. Specifically, countries and journals that contributed to the publication of the 246 most-cited articles are identified. The authors further reveal the key words, research models, and sample characteristics found in the selected publications.

In the second contribution, Yin et al. [2] focused on the antecedents of remote research and development (R&D) teams’ innovation performance. Drawing from a social cognitive perspective, this study explores the mediating mechanism of team leader’s conflict management style on the team innovation performance and the boundary conditions of these impacts caused by team leaders’ conflict management style. The research samples of paired data from 118 remote R&D teams are collected in the Chinese context. By doing so, the findings reveal that team trust moderates the relationship between team leaders’ cooperative conflict management style and team psychological safety. Moreover, team leaders’ cooperative conflict management style can enhance their team’s psychological safety and further effectively improve their team’s innovation performance. Such research offers useful implications for practitioners planning to manage conflicts in remote R&D teams.

In the third contribution, Zheng et al. [3] analyzed the dynamic effects of various technology innovations (introduction, socialization, and differentiation) on a company’s sustainable business model innovation (efficiency, novelty, and co-benefit innovations) under different crises. Based on rooted theory, a multi-case analysis including 35 companies in various industries was conducted. The findings emphasize the important role of technology innovation, such as big data and artificial intelligence, when encountering a crisis. In addition, this research indicates three paths for companies to achieve a sustainable business model innovation when facing corresponding crisis scenarios. At last, the authors also provided a practical guidance for companies by demonstrating a framework linking an optimal technical scheme with a matching crisis.

In the fourth contribution, Wu et al. [4] studied how employees’ organizational citizenship behavior for the environment (OCBE) is influenced by institutional pressure through the lens of neo-institutionalism theory and the theory of planned behavior. By conducting a longitudinal tracking questionnaire survey based on the paired data collected from 207 employees in China, the results indicate that institutional pressure has not only a direct positive effect on OCBE, but also an indirect effect through the mediator of a green emotion. In addition, this study discovers the moderating role of green management practice in each link. These findings highlight the role of institutional pressure as a key antecedent of OCBE and contribute to the current literature by emphasizing the three-stage regulation of green management practice in this process.