Sustainability Leadership in Saudi Non-profit Organizations: A Qualitative Insight Governance

Leadership in Saudi Arabia is one of the major objectives of Vision 2030, which is aimed at developing the country’s private, public and nonprofit organizations (NPOs). Leadership therefore needs to incorporate key issues that are emerging in the context of preparing necessary skills to lead such organizations in the future. This research provides qualitative insights into leadership practice by measuring the impacts on achieving sustainability leadership by gaining a full understanding of the processes nonprofit sector leaders use to encourage sustainability and change in their organizations. Encouraging sustainability requires specific competencies, and strong leadership is critical to the process of ensuring that governance becomes sustainable. In this study a qualitative methodology was designed, and fifteen Executive directors CEOs from NPOs took part in semi-structured interviews as well as one focus group containing six professionals from non-profit corporate sectors including education, health, environmental clubs, foundations and human resources. Thematic analysis was applied to analyse critical elements that governed individuals’ ability to contribute to institutional results. The findings demonstrated eight areas of results-based functions and activities of sustainable nonprofit leadership to identify insights into leadership. These are governance arrangements, leadership as a dynamic role, teamwork empowerment, strategy and procedure processes, control and governance resources, collaboration and network relationships, encouraging social investment, and social value results. The findings suggest that leaders of various NPOs have to overcome external and internal challenges effectively in order to succeed in their mission focusing on financial and social purposes. Exploring the nature of sustainability leadership competencies in Saudi NPOs will result in learning, innovation and change in terms of outcomes by helping leaders to add social value as a core factor of their mission.