Sustainable Development Goals as a Factor in Organizational Competitiveness and the Role of Sustainability Leadership: A Conceptual Model

This chapter proposes a theoretical discussion on organizational competitiveness, sustainable development, and leadership. We argue that sustainable development is grounded on sustainability leadership and that organizational values, innovation, and social capital determine sustainable development as a factor of competitiveness. Competitiveness is considered in this study as the ability of organizations to formulate and implement strategies that enable them to expand and maintain, long term, a sustainable advantage position in the Market (Hughes, in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 1987) It is argued that this definition of competitiveness is possible only in the face of a long-lived economic, natural, and social environment (Banerjee, in Australian Journal of Management, 27: 105–117, 2002). To implement this idea, it is essential to have leaders with values directed toward sustainability. The contributions of this proposal are to provide a means for organizations to consider the orientation toward sustainable development in their strategy, becoming a factor of competitiveness.