The intellectual structure and thematic evolution of sustainable leadership and green innovation research

This study aims to map and synthesize global research on sustainable leadership and green innovation from 2015 to 2025. It clarifies publication trends, intellectual structures, leading contributors, and thematic developments to provide a comprehensive overview of how sustainable leadership supports green innovation. A quantitative bibliometric approach was employed, drawing on the Scopus database. A total of 394 eligible documents were analyzed through performance analysis, co-authorship networks, bibliographic coupling, and keyword co-occurrence mapping. VOSviewer was used to visualize collaboration structures, thematic clusters, and the temporal evolution of research fronts. The results show strong and accelerating growth in publications, with a sharp surge after 2023. Research is primarily anchored in management, environmental science, and social sciences, but shows increasing integration with engineering, energy, and health-related fields. China emerges as the dominant contributor in terms of publication volume, collaboration networks, and citation influence. Thematic evolution reveals a shift from an early focus on environmental efficiency and innovation capabilities toward more holistic topics such as green human resource management (GHRM), green intellectual capital, environmental identity, green learning, and alignment with the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Sustainable leadership consistently appears as a catalyst that enhances green innovation through mechanisms such as green organizational culture, knowledge sharing, and learning systems.