Contributions of Regenerative Leadership to team collaboration and Social Sustainability

Sammanfattning

Regenerative Leadership is a newly emerged leadership approach with a holistic worldview that is aiming to restore, preserve and enhance people, society and environment. It is a purposeful and empathic leadership that focuses on fostering partnerships between people and nature. In this research, we investigated application of this approach in work teams to promote collaboration and strategically contribute to Social Sustainability. By conducting several interviews with Regenerative Leadership practitioners and analyzing them doing qualitative content analysis, we found that Regenerative Leaders build team cultures that shift power and agency to the team as collective, the collaborative processes are centered around self-organization and inclusive decision-making. Building a culture of trust and encouraging learning, the leaders strengthen the adaptive capacities in the small social system of their work teams, thereby contributing to social sustainability. The way the interviewed leaders make decisions, how they choose the people in their team, what they value, how they act in a moment of misunderstanding in their team, what is their attitude towards the collective – all this is not only inspired by RL theory, but by the personal values and in particular by the spiritual convictions of the leaders.Even with the spiritual and personal perspectives of the interviewees, Regenerative Leadership strengthens all adaptive capacities of a work team as a social system. Moreover, this leadership paradigm offers a vision and values as a source of inspiration for the team members to collaborate Therefore, the approaches taken by leaders in this new and emergent field are effective ways to integrate the science-based principles of Social Sustainability into work teams