Transformational leadership, sustainability governance, and organizational maturity in higher education institutions: a systematic review toward sustainable energy performance

Abstract

Universities consume energy at an industrial scale, yet most struggle to translate sustainability commitments into operational change. Three constructs bear on this problem: transformational leadership (TL), sustainability governance, and organizational maturity. Each has its own research tradition, but whether and how they converge in the higher education literature remains unclear. This systematic review maps that convergence. Following PRISMAL 2020, we searched Scopus and Web of Science for work published between 2014 and 2026, identifying 230 records that were screened down to a final corpus of 34 studies for descriptive bibliometric and thematic analysis. Leadership was the most frequently central construct: 50.0% of studies treat it as a focus, followed by governance at 44.1%. Organizational maturity was central in only one study (2.9%). No study in the corpus treated all three constructs as central variables, and none paired leadership with maturity in the absence of governance; these patterns held under both strict (direct-only) and lax (direct-plus-partial) coding. The corpus was overwhelmingly unidimensional: 85.3% of studies addressed a single construct as a central variable. Asia and the Middle East contributed 55.9% of studies; Latin America only 5.9%, with a single study from Ecuador. Six thematic categories emerged, from green TL and PLS-SEM work to German governance frameworks and Latin American case studies. Within the reviewed corpus, two gaps are notable: no study examined how leadership builds organizational maturity for sustainability directly, and no study integrated all three constructs as central variables. Leadership maturity models exist in professional practice but were not identified in HEI sustainability research. Read as a research agenda rather than a settled conclusion, these patterns motivate five propositions oriented toward a Governance and Maturity Model (MGM) for scaling solar energy and efficiency projects on university campuses, with particular attention to Latin American contexts where structured maturity diagnostics appear most needed.