Over the past decade, international and local communities realised the sustainable construction industry, and particularly the building sector of construction industry, as vital in encouraging societal change towards sustainable construction in a global context. In this regard, project managers and construction leaders of sustainable projects are convinced to transform the subordinates, and influence them to achieve better sustainable performance.

In sustainable development a leader can achieve better sustainability and productivity by the style of his/her leadership and the way to manage the project as well as the subordinates. Although there are manty definitions for leaderships, it remains one of the most observed but least understood phenomenon of the word. Defining leadership clearly is hard because the nature of leadership itself is complicated. The key components associated with the leadership is defined as a process whereby a leader with his/her will power and intelligence has a positive effect on the subordinates to be able to attain organizational objectives within the time, funding and quality.

This study has been carried out by “Amin Akhavan Tabassi*, Kamand M. Roufechaei, Mahyuddin Ramli, Abu Hassan Abu Bakar, Radzi Ismail, A. Hamid Kadir Pakir” from the school of housing, building and planning, University Sains Malaysia (USM), 11800 Penang Malaysia.

This study is about extending leadership behaviour and transformational qualities as hierarchal, reflective construct, integrating ten associated components used for the assessment of leadership behaviour in a sustainable project. The model is used to observe a direct impact of project managers/leaders on the success criteria for sustainable buildings. 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.

Sustainable building construction plays a major role in terms of human impact on natural environment and in the quality of life (Anink et al., 1996; Lu and Zhang,2016). Many researchers have considered the building industry as s sector with ability to achieve high level of human needs as well as sustainable development requirements. For example (Anink et al., 1996) realised that the world building industry accounts for a considerable number of worlds environmental damage, as the buildings accounts for 17 % of worlds fresh water withdrawals, 25% of worlds wood cutting, 40 % of worlds material and energy flow and a major path of employment and land usage. In addition to that (Lu and Zhang,2016) emphasised that ignorance of eco-friendly construction works could result in significant issues to a nation. Furthermore, during the construction, maintenance and operation and the time span of construction projects, there are many types of pollution and unwanted effects on the environment. Particularly the industry drains more than 50 % of extracted materials, which results in 180 million tons of waste produced every year, and cause site related nuisances such as traffic, noise etc (World energy Outlook, 2011).   Therefore, the management in this industry needs to take account of all conditions and sustainability attitudes within project design, construction, and maintenance.

This study was carried out to contribute to the strength in sustainability, particularly in the construction industry of developing countries like Malaysia. It can be said undoubtedly that sustainability is not at an adequate level, and developing countries like Malaysia has only just commenced to deal with the challenge of sustainable development in the construction industry. A research on sustainable project development and leadership behaviour in the construction industry will have a positive influence on the development of the project and drive forward a future for better performance in the building sector in countries like Malaysia. Most of the research done in the construction industry is done on the design concepts for sustainability and therefore not enough research has been done in leadership competences and quality practices of the leaders in sustainable development of building projects. This research has been designed to build a model to study the most effective leadership competence in sustainable building construction to answer the following question:

Does the leadership style of the leaders affect the achievement in success criteria of the green building projects?

Leadership

               In the 21st century a leadership is valued more than ever before. Reviewing the leadership literature and theories in the past two decades shows that while leadership has been broadly studied in organizational management literature, it still is a dynamic concept for development of communication toward others, and used to influence subordinates to accomplish the desired goals. However, the wide concept of leadership can be summarised into three interlinked domains: personal characteristics of a leader, leadership style, and situational theories (Fryer et al., 2004). In other words, leadership is a dynamic behaviour and the role of a leader changes with the change in circumstances and traits. Consequently, no ultimate leadership behaviour can exist, and the many ways that leadership has been conceptualized will influence the relationship among leaders and followers who intend real change and results which reflects shared goals. Therefore, effective leadership is required for rapid, complex and discontinuous change.  While the role of leadership has long been recognized as success factor in organizations, regarding the context of a specific project, there have still not been enough studies to support the relation between leadership style and project success, particularly in the context of sustainable building construction. However, overall project success consists of some dimensions that depends on the managers leadership style and performance. Corresponding to the competence school of leadership, (Dulewicz and Higgs (2005) performed a detailed review of current theories and determined fifteen leadership dimensions that can be divided under two competences, intellectual (IQ) and managerial (MQ) and a personal characteristics measurement named emotional and social dimensions EQ.