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Despite multiple efforts, achieving sustainable societies remains an elusive target that will require transformative change at all levels. While such change has to start at the top of an organization, its success depends on effective implementation. For technical organizations, sustainability implementation rests in a large part with the many engineering teams responsible for meeting client needs and organizational targets. Project and line managers have to influence those team members to adopt the moral characteristics necessary to engineer sustainable projects as part of everyday practice. To support their leadership efforts, we draw on care ethics and sustainability ethics in the form of an engineering ethic to propose a framework to orient and ground the reflective practices of those engineering managers. We discuss the challenges involved with internalizing this framework and suggest future empirical work needed before the framework can be operationalized. Embedding sustainability in daily engineering practice has to evolve at the professional level by formulating and propagating the relevant engineering codes, and evolve at the educational level by making sustainability part of the formal engineering curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The building industry has been acknowledged as being vital in stimulating societal change toward sustainable development in a global context. From a theoretical perspective, this study extends leadership competencies and transformational leadership qualities as hierarchical, reflective constructs, integrating ten associated components. The research analysis was completed using a sample population of 70 project managers in sustainable building projects. The model shows that leadership competencies, as well as the transformational leadership qualities of project managers as second-order reflective constructs experience a direct impact on the success criteria for sustainable buildings. In addition, the results indicate that the intellectual competence of project managers plays the most significant role in sustainable building achievements. In general, the present study extends some of the significant components from leadership assessment in the context of construction project managers in sustainable building projects and has generated a new model to facilitate the process of sustainability in the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]