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Servant leadership as an important driver for the implementation of sustainability reporting: How the municipality of haarlem is transforming its sustainability practices

Currently, we face a variety of transformations to achieve a more sustainable society. In this paper, we demonstrate that servant leadership is an important driver for these transformations. Servant leaders tend to place the followers’ needs before their own needs (Greenleaf, 1970). Several scholars have recognized the potential importance of servant leadership in public sector organizations (Shim et al., 2016). As Slack et al. (2020, p. 632) remark, servant leadership ‘is considered a natural model in the public sector’ because ‘leaders in public organizations are thought to have stronger intentions to serve in comparison to leaders who lead private organizations’. However, there is limited research on servant leadership in the public sector (Miao et al., 2014; Slack et al., 2020). Using servant leadership as a theoretical lens, we describe how the Dutch municipality of Haarlem developed its sustainability budget over time and discuss its experiences. By analyzing the development of the sustainability budget, we found that the mayor and aldermen showed servant leadership behavior by taking responsibility and giving direction, but at the same time empowering employees to take initiatives and benefitting from the expertise of others.