How Do Leadership Behaviours Affect Employee Attitudes Towards Sustainability? A case study on IT consultancy Cybercom

Abstract: While managers increasingly see the importance of corporate social responsibility, incorporating it in the business often fails (Keys et al., 2009). Organizational sustainability performance can improve if employees have positive attitudes towards sustainability (Wang et al., 2011). This thesis aims to explore how different leadership behaviours in case company Cybercom have influenced the attitudes of its employees. New analytical tools are developed for analysing the data collected through interviews with employees at Cybercom. The findings indicate several connections between the leadership behaviours studied, and the attitudinal components. One main finding was that all four leadership behaviours in Cybercom had, to a certain extent, led to the affective outcome of feeling that sustainability was more important, the cognitive outcome of learning about the business perspective of sustainability, and the behavioural outcome of communicating more or differently about sustainability. It is concluded that Cybercom has helped shape its employees’ attitudes through various factors such as employee training, leaders acting as role models and motivators, written materials and workshops.The theoretical contributions of this paper consist of new knowledge in the field of leadership shaping employee attitudes, as well as new analytical tools. The practical contributions of this paper are managerial implications for Cybercom.