Leadership Ambiguity as a Sustainability Challenge: Governance and Ethical Risk in Knowledge-Intensive Organizations

Sustainability leadership is understood here as the capacity to sustain collaboration, learning, and ethical legitimacy over time in complex organizations. This case study examines leadership ambiguity and coordination dynamics within a multidisciplinary academic project involving a senior supervisor, a doctoral researcher, and a postdoctoral collaborator from distinct disciplinary backgrounds. It analyzes how ambiguous communication, intermittent engagement, and selective reward distribution generate dependency, inequity, and defensive behavior. Building on organizational-behavior and anthropological perspectives—including Salisbury’s concept of reciprocal but asymmetric exchange—the study interprets these patterns as both emergent and, at times, strategically maintained to consolidate symbolic control. By integrating theories of destructive leadership, moralized favoritism, and social exchange, the paper proposes a framework of procedural and institutional remedies that transform discretionary authority into accountable and transparent practice. The findings highlight how ethical governance and structured reciprocity can sustain collaboration and learning in knowledge-intensive research environments.