Leadership research has transitioned from studying the character traits, position and background of individuals towards an exploration of the process of leadership. This transition has been welcomed by many scholars who claim that leadership is an ongoing combination of actions that are socially co-constructed by several actors (Crevani, Lindgren & Packendorff, 2010). Previous scholarship has recognised that co-construction of leadership emergence has taken place through the pursuit of common goals, meaning-making and joint outcomes (Bennis, 2007; Drath, McCauley, Palus, Van Velsor, O’Connor & McGuire, 2008; Uhl-Bien, 2006). Research on how leadership is co-created was insufficient to understand how co-creation was happening within the processes of leadership. The study investigated how leadership was co-created within a specific case context. This research was conducted on a global scale but undertaken in South Africa. It was further decided to locate the research during the evolving process of the concept of Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) (the emergent case context), which is one of many multidisciplinary approaches to sustainable development. NCA, however, has been pitched as an innovative tool to bring about well-needed systemic transformative change in society. Relational leadership theory, which is the study of both relationships and relational dynamics of leadership (Uhl-Bien, 2006), in the same breath, has been earmarked as an important mechanism for improving our understanding of the growing need for integration of processes, actions and tenets across disciplines in sustainability research (Nicholson & Kurucz, 2019). Relational leadership was the chosen theoretical frame for the study which provided the evidence of how co-creation happened. Five (5) key themes that underpinned relational leadership were identified and provided the structure for the emerging results of the study. These included “Context”, “Value creation”, “Communication”, “Partnerships and relationships”, and “Emotion.” Key experts from around the world within the emergent case context of NCA were interviewed to provide insights into the micro-dynamics of co-creation. Five (5) key tenets have emerged from the study. These were “Ambiguity”, “Credibility”, “Conversation and/or dialogue”, “Structures and systems”, and “Optimistic”. These tenets, interacting with each other and with other identified elements, contributed to our understanding of how co-creation in relational leadership was taking place. Relational leadership theory has been advanced by presenting a construct of co-creation, where the key tenets and other interacting elements identified were developed into a co-creation model that served as a modest theoretical contribution specifically to the relational leadership trajectory and to other relationship centred leadership theories and philosophies. The model served as an integrated mechanism to improve understanding of leadership and advance the implementation of NCA. Key words: Relational, leadership, Natural Capital Accounting, co-creation / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / University of Pretoria, Postgraduate Bursary / Business Management / PhD / Unrestricted

In order to extend ecological footprint analysis (EFA) to electronic products, new methods had to be developed which associate the world average bioproductive space per capita and year - the fair Earth share - with an individual product. The problem analysed in this thesis is the need for an environmental assessment tool for electronic products, which uses natural capital accounting. This need arose because so far, electronic products were mainly assessed using life cycle analysis with a focus on toxicity. Since the ecological footprint (EF) is a sustainability indicator, the sustainability discussion and in particular its relevance and implications with regard to the EF is reviewed. The electronic products assessed in this thesis are a personal computer (PC) in an exploratory study, and three mobile phones (two main case studies and one updated case study). To establish the land areas used by the mined materials used in electronic products, a database was developed based on site specific data found in the literature, and on approximations from the density of materials and their overburden. A life cycle energy approach was used to determine the burdens from producing and using a mobile phone. In order to estimate energy requirements for materials for which no data was available, the relationship between abundance and rucksack / overburden values was used in a regression analysis. Direct land use data and results from the energy analysis were used as an inventory for the subsequent EFA. An EF time series was applied to represent a more accurate picture of PC and phone use. This was also necessary since the EF reflects the instantaneous rate (a snapshot) of resource consumption. Key results are that the EF of electronic products are much larger than their actual size and that different electronic products have different EF. Our methodology proved sensitive enough to reveal differences even in small electronic products, given the high benchmark of a fair Earth share, and useful in monitoring space-efficient technology.