Beyond Industry 5.0: Leadership 5.0—Driving Future-Ready Organizations

The aim of this paper is to fill the identified gap in the literature regarding mapping key values within Leadership 5.0. Our study indicates that Leadership 5.0 (L5.0) shows a transformative shift in leadership, demanding innovative leaders to adopt agile and digital mindsets, hence fostering innovation whilst balancing human and technological needs in Industry 5.0 settings. Developing people-centric leadership skills is critical in order to build collaborative innovation between humans and machines. In this way, human expertise is integrated with technology, to drive future-ready organizations. Findings show that L5.0 prioritizes continuous learning environments to adapt to rapidly evolving challenges. This ensures that organizations are agile, resilient, and ready for the future. L5.0 recognizes that intellectual capital—driven by human creativity, emotional intelligence, and collaboration—is essential for sustainable innovation in the digital shift. This paper’s theoretical contribution is a conceptual analysis of L5.0. We present a comprehensive and actionable conceptual model for mapping L5.0. We identify five key L5.0 pillars from the literature: human-centric leadership, future readiness and adaptability, a sustainability and ethics focus, collaboration and inclusion values and an innovation and experimentation approach to leadership. We develop a 30-item L5.0 survey instrument, anchored in the literature, and we conduct initial pilot testing for item clarification. The survey instrument application can provide valuable management insights: a road map for assessing the presence and maturity level of L5.0 in organizations.