Corporate sustainability is presumed to be a business strategy that creates long-term value by focusing on innovative measures aimed towards the natural environment and aligning it with its external environment. Continuous measures at global, institutional, and individual level have to be taken up to ensure sustainability paving the way to bring concepts like circular economy, sustainable practices into limelight among the scholars, academicians, and even corporate houses. This chapter tries to establish a link between a leader's role in an organization and creating spaces for circular economy and sustainability in their already existing cycles. On the basis of the steps taken for creating a sustainable business by TATA rganization, the chapter explores their leadership style and suggests that the values such as responsibility, humanity, and empathy in leadership became more important and goes well with the vision of circular economy and how well it has been dwelled up with the business models of TATA.
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The conditions prevailing on the planet at present with the emergence of global pandemic, economic crisis and degrading environment has turned the interest area of researchers, academicians, scientist, industrialist and even common people towards the phenomenon of sustainability, environment protection, circular economy and other green philosophies. The situation is alarming because we are on the verge of extinction of many valuable resources. With the population at its ever-growing rate (almost 8.5 billion by 2030 as per the forecast by United Nation Department of Economic and Social Affairs in 2017) even the need for basic amenities like food, shelter, clothing is at stake and paving its way for exploitation being done at a rapid rate causing severe depletion of the environment will make the planet a difficult place to live in. Along with that around 3 billion consumers (middle class) are expected to join the global markets by 2030 (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2010). Considering all these factors, in recent years, various green concepts have made an appealing impact on the people and influenced them to move towards a safer world.
Big business houses are exploring a business model (Bocken et al., 2016), to eradicate the risk of depletion, overutilization of resources, inflation and materialistic revenue increments. Henceforth, Sustainability is the only panacea in case applied can help out natural environment conservation, reducing overexploitation of resources, moving to circular use of resources, and many more. Thus, a sustainable approach will help in keeping the ecosystem operational, intact and maintaining the quality of life for future generations. There are many sources identified leading to environmental degradation (Andersen, 2007) and out of them the industrial sector has been the major stakeholder apart from consumers and public, which are affecting the environment and its sustainability with their anti-environmental acts and behavior. The industrial impact is though economical in the areas of employment, services, profits, growth, but it negatively influences the ecosystem and therefore at present, the companies are mandated with Corporate Social Responsibility (Rajeev & Kalagnanam, 2017), to assure that they are giving back to society and ensuring environmental sustainability.
The industries are now moving from the linear cycle to a circular cycle with respect to the goods and services, manufactured and delivered to the ultimate consumer groups, thereby ensuring the reusability, recycling, reduction and recovery of the environment and resources and maintaining economic prosperity for present as well future generations (Beccarello & Foggia, 2018). However there is still a disconnect between the industrial innovations and academics while it comes to create sustainable organisation and vice versa. The available research cannot recommend one best way to establish sustainability in the system. Apart from this the concept of circular economy is still at a developing stage; it is not that easy to make a shift and therefore, can be applied to different forms of industries only with the right leadership supporting it. The leaders play a vital role in making the organizations and its people adhere to the principles of circular economy as it requires round the world collaborations, cross portfolio co-ordinations and understanding of different cultures and businesses across the globe. The focus of the chapter is to establish the connection between leadership and circular economy and then identifying and establishing the right leadership (Robinson, Kleffner, & Bertels, 2011), which can create a trustable, sustainable and growing environment for people to work.
Thereby ensuring the environment conservation and protection as leaders are the ones helping the organizations in their continuous drive for growth and success by creating awareness about the circular economy and using the interpersonal skills to effectively spread out and communicate the broader intentions of it to the stakeholders (Doh & Quigley, 2014).