Towards a Meaningful Understanding of Organizational Leaders' Localized and Contextualized Implementation of UNSDGs in Bahrain's Changing Energy Sector Businesses

<p> </p>\n<p>Despite Network Leadership scholarship’s emphasis on localizing and contextualizing leadership practices during organizational change, there is a dearth in the current theoretical framings on ‘how’ to address the implementation failure of localization and contextualization towards broader SDGs/organizational sustainability. This paper fills this gap by offering deeper insightful theoretical and practical understanding of how organizational leaders can address socio-economic and ecological sustainability concerns, and how a more meaningful reconceptualization and implementation of leadership practices can help Business and Management academics and practitioners address the organizational growth, human and ecological well-being dilemma in the energy sector. By drawing on Network Leadership, SDG, organizational change literature and 26 senior leaders’ semi-structured interviews, this study uses Braun and Clarke’s (2006) Thematic Analysis Procedure to resolve the theoretical and practical implementation lag in Business and Management scholarship. We contribute 4 novel implementation practices: 1) operational; 2) strategic; 3) cultural and 4) interorganizational knowledge exchange alignment and a model on wider socio-economic-ecological well-being. Showing ‘what’ leadership characteristics are needed and ‘how’ to meaningfully reconceptualize the dominant localization and contextualization model of organizational change towards broader sustainability goals has been practically and scholarly overdue.</p>