SUSTAINABLE LEADERSHIP IN LITHUANIAN ORGANISATIONS

The theory of sustainable leadership is relevant not only to some specific organisation and its community, but to the world community at large: it means responsible leadership and rational use of resources without making attempts to obtain maximum benefit for minimum cost. Therefore it is necessary to analyse the phenomenon of sustainable leadership, although frequently one can only regret that in Lithuania it is vastly underestimated. The research problem is obvious: insufficient understanding of the conception of sustainable leadership and its application in organisations. The research aim - to define the conception of sustainable leadership and to carry out research in sustainable leadership - has been implemented. The employed research methods included analysis of scientific literature, comparison, synthesis, methods of summarisation and logical abstraction, and a questionnaire. For the research, non-stochastic random selection of respondents was chosen. 5,142 organisations were invited to participate; however, only 311 questionnaires were filled in and returned. We sought to involve organisations from different fields of activity in our research. The majority of the respondents came from the field of services, as well as of the fields of trade, education, and industry. As established, there were great differences between state-owned and private business organisations with respect to sustainable leadership. Thus, e.g., the respondents of state-owned organisations mainly tended to disagree that the leaders of their enterprises focused on the development and reinforcement of organisational values and that the organisational values coincided with the employees' personal values, while the respondents from the organisations of private. To sum up, we can conclude that business organisations were more guided by the principles of sustainable leadership than the state-owned organisations.