Faced with the increasing environmental pollution, the society has called organizations to take the environmental responsibility and adopt green management practice. Leaders, as the decision makers and monitors of organizational activities, have been considered to playing a crucial role in organizations’ green management by encouraging and fulfilling the green goals. Hence, some scholar applied traditional transformational leadership theory to the green management field and proposed the concept of green transformational leadership. Since its emergence, green transformational leadership has attracted many scholars’ attention and interests. Green transformational leadership refers to the leaders’ actions that motivate followers to strive for the organizational green vision and encourage followers to achieve green performance beyond the expectation. To date, some scholars adapted the Avolio and Bass’s (1995) MLQ to measure green transformational leadership by including some environmental words or sentences. Considering MLQ charges for use, some other scholars adapted the transformational leadership scale developed by Podsakoff et al.’s (1990) to create the measurement of green transformational leadership. Given the adaption of traditional transformational scale may reduce the reliability and cannot represent the construct comprehensively, Robertson (in press) reexamined the structure of green transformational leadership and developed a four-dimension scale, which includes environmental idealized influence, environmental inspirational motivation, environmental intellectual stimulation, environmental individualized consideration. Several studies have investigated the consequence of green transformational leadership and provided the empirical support for the green implication of green transformational leadership. Specifically, green transformational leadership has been found to facilitate followers’ green behavior, green creativity and organizational green behavior, green product development, and green innovation performance. The effect of green transformational leadership on follower green behavior is robust even after controlling for the effect of general transformational leadership. Further, social cognitive theory, affective event theory, self-determination theory, organizational identification and dynamic ability theory provides the theoretical explanation for the underlying mechanism of the green transformational leadership – green outcome relation. For example, social cognitive theory was used to explain the mediating role of green self-efficacy, green mindfulness and green conscious, affective event theory was used to explain the mediating role of pro-environmental harmonious passion, self-determination theory is used to explain the mediating role of autonomous motivation and controlled motivation, social identity theory is used to explain the mediating role of green organizational identity and dynamic ability theory was used to explain the mediating role of organizational green ability. Finally, we demonstrate four directions for future research. First, future research could integrate and compare the multiple ways through which green transformational leadership exert effects on green behavior, which can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying mechanism. Second, we suggest future research to adopt a contingency approach and explore the moderating role of Chinese culture (collectivism and power distance) in the relationship between green transformational leadership and green behavior. Third, an actor perspective on the effect of transformational leadership on leaders themselves (i.e, leader well-being) needs to receive more attention. Finally, future research should devote efforts to identify the ways to develop green transformational leaders by exploring the antecedents of green transformational leadership.