Society is placing an increasing demand on organizations to surpass their legal obligations and exhibit more robust commitments to addressing social and environmental issues. As a result, business leaders are left with the important challenge to address these calls while ensuring their primary assignment of maximizing profits. Accordingly, scholars have been devoting attention to studying how chief executive officers (CEOs), top management teams (TMTs), and boards of directors (BODs) shape their organizations’ social and environmental impact. What do we know about the influence of strategic leaders on social and environmental efforts and how can we move this research forward? Our study aims to address this question, provide an organizing framework, and highlight opportunities for future research by systematically reviewing 167 studies published between 2000 and 2022 across 34 journals. Taking a broad conceptualization of social and environmental impact, our review uncovers that theories on the impact of CEOs, TMTs, and BODs on social and environmental impact have coalesced around six major themes: moral duty, prior experiences, external forces and signals, diverse perspectives, financial motives, and power distribution. We synthesize research on each theme, advance integrative suggestions, and propose research opportunities within each strategic leadership level
