Higher Education Students’ Reflections on Sustainable and Human-Centered Leadership in the Digital Era: Perspectives, Experiences, and Learning Needs

Higher education (HE) institutions need to develop innovative pedagogies that engage and motivate people from diverse disciplines and professional backgrounds to co-innovate solutions to complex problems. This study builds on the frameworks of sustainable leadership in organizations (Liao, 2022), a human-to-human (H2H) approach to business and marketing (Kotler et al., 2021), and transdisciplinary leadership (Barrett et al., 2019) to develop students’ transformative competences (OECD, 2019). The informants were a multicultural group of 11 master students from the degree program of Leading Business Transformation at a Finnish university of Applied Sciences, combining their studies with employment. During an 8-week evening course, students reflected on their learning through semi-structured learning diaries. The diary data was thematically analyzed to test how HE students active in the world of work perceive the principles and values of sustainable leadership and to explore their practical experiences and learning needs. The findings indicate that a human-to-human approach to business leadership and stakeholder collaboration was well in line with students’ values and expectations across cultures. Developing sustainable leadership skills was considered an important learning need on individual, organizational, and societal levels. The findings help educators develop reflective pedagogical tools to address the evolving needs of transformative sustainability education.