On Agile Leadership and Project Sustainability

Sustainability is the predominant topic right now and will remain so in the coming decades, which adds another layer to the already existing complexity accompanying digitalization. At the same time, many organizations embrace agile leadership on project or organizational level, to better deal with complexity and constant changes. The objective of this paper is to investigate potential impacts of agile leadership on project sustainability. This is done by mapping categories of agile leadership to the three sustainability dimensions “people, profit, and planet” (triple bottom line). While certain sustainability aspects can be addressed primarily by top level decision making and the mindset of leaders, other aspects are directly influenced by an agile environment and way of working. Overall, the results highlight natural synergies between agile leadership and sustainability and provide an impulse for further research.