How Does Sustainable Leadership Influence Sustainable Performance? Empirical Evidence From Selected ASEAN Countries

Abstract

Presently, sustainable leadership has emerged as an effective leadership style to cope with sustainable challenges. Extent literature has recommended exploring the mechanism and conditional boundaries for the significant effect of sustainable leadership on sustainable performance. Therefore, this study would investigate the mediating mechanism of organizational learning and the psychological empowerment as conditional factor on the sustainable leadership–sustainable performance relationship. The cluster-sampling approach was employed to collect data from 369 small medium enterprises in selected ASEAN countries: Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei Darussalam. The response rate is 41%. Structural equation modeling (variance-based) analysis was performed to empirically confirm the proposed hypotheses. By running PROCESS Macro in SPSS, the moderated-mediation analysis was conducted in this study. The research outcomes revealed that higher level of psychological empowerment will result in a higher indirect effect of sustainable leadership on sustainable performance through organizational learning. Based on the present empirical evidences, implications and future research directions have also been added at the end of study. To date, this study has preliminary investigated the interplay of sustainable leadership, organizational learning, empowerment, and sustainable performance.

To walk in beauty: Sustainable leadership, frugal innovation and environmental performance

“…In Singh et al (2020), product innovation mediated the green HRM practicesenvironmental performance relationship. Past research also offered scientific evidence concerning the mediating impact of psychological safety and organisational learning involving the sustainable leadership-sustainable performance relationship, hence amplifying the presence of psychological empowerment Iqbal et al, 2020a;. In a study involving Taiwanese organisations that manufactured hybrid vehicles, Huang and Li (2017) revealed that innovation mediated the market demand impact on economic performance.…”

“…Overall, vision-sharing, experimentation empowerment and amicable leadership-employee relationship were highly sorted as essential qualities for organisational innovations (Elkins & Keller, 2003;Juhro & Aulia, 2019). In this regard, sustainable leadership reflects on offering a psychologically safe workplace for the staff (Iqbal et al, 2020a).…”

Sustainable Leadership in Frontier Asia Region: Managerial Discretion and Environmental Innovation

“…Sustainable leaders also nurture generation and sharing of ideas, two-way communication, which leads to a mentally secure environment for innovation [33,36]. A polite relationship between top management and employees also plays a critical role in promoting creative activities within organizations [42], which is one of the fundamental practices of sustainable leadership [27]. By innovating incrementally, sustainable leadership practices introduce continuous improvements in products and processes at a small scale [43,44].…”

“…Considering the insufficiency of empirical evidence about the role of sustainable leadership and its relationship with environmental innovation [27,28], there are limited studies on the environmental performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) [3] and environmental challenges faced by the frontier Asia region. The present research fulfills the research gap by investigating the mediating effect of environmental innovation on the relationship of sustainable leadership with environmental performance and the conditional effect of managerial discretion.…”

Sustainable leadership and sustainable performance of hospitality firms in South Africa

“…One of the ways to achieve sustainable development is for business organisations to accept the challenges of sustainability as an opportunity and transform their business models accordingly. Sustainability is a new business trend that has fundamentally changed the demands placed on business leaders and has created a new type of leadership termed sustainable leadership (Virakul, 2015;Igbal et al, 2020).…”