PRESENTING A GROUNDED THEORY MODEL OF THE SUSTAINABLE LEADERSHIP FOUNDATION IN THE IRAQI INSURANCE INDUSTRY: THE EMERGING APPROACH OF CHARMAZ

Abstract

In the evolving landscape of organizational leadership, the concept of sustainable leadership has emerged as a strategic imperative, especially in industries such as insurance, where trust, long-term value creation, and accountability to stakeholders are at the centre of attention. For this purpose, the present study was conducted with the aim of presenting a grounded theory model of the Sustainable Leadership Foundation in the Iraqi insurance industry with the emerging approach of Charmaz. We used the heterogeneous snowball sampling method to select experts from the insurance industry and academia for the study sample. The collected interviews were entered into MAXQDA software as a text file and analyzed through three processes: open, axial, and selective coding. The findings of the research showed that 7 main categories of sustainability in business—sustainable innovative solutions, sustainability strategy, organizational thinking, characteristics of sustainable leaders, diversification of insurance products, and organizational sustainability performance can be identified from 122 open codes. According to the nature of the qualitative strategy of the emerging grounded theory, overlapping coding, scale coding, long-term involvement of researchers with the research field, and the opinions of the focus group were used for selective coding and model presentation. In the newly born model of the research, 7 main hypotheses were obtained, of which two are unique hypotheses in the world, namely the existence of a relationship between the two variables of "sustainability strategy" and "sustainability in business" and "sustainable innovative solution" and "organizational sustainability performance."