Abstract:

Executive leadership and board governance are key issues in strategic management and there is a substantial literature that explores the relationship between executive leadership, board governance and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practice. This research focuses on the literature related to sustainable executive leadership and employs bibliometric co-citation analysis to uncover the intellectual roots of the literature. We want to trace the knowledge structure that the field is built upon, and in so doing, suggest fruitful ways forward for further research. We performed a literature search from 1999 to 2025 and split the data into two windows: 1999–2020 and 2021–2025, allowing us to detect longitudinal changes and to make the co-citation data more meaningful. The resulting multidimensional scaling (MDS) maps illustrate the development of the field from a collection of firm-level financial rationales and generalizations based on an upper echelons theory application to highly clustered, specific themes dealing with the psychological characteristics of the CEOs and targeted climate governance of the board.