Relationships between top managers’ leadership and infrastructure sustainability

Abstract

Purpose -Top managers who possess outstanding leadership competence make significant contributions toward achieving project success. The relationship between the top managers' leadership and infrastructure sustainability (IS), one of the most important project success criteria, is empirically researched in this study. The purpose of this paper is to explore relationships between top managers' leadership competence of intellectual competence (IQ), managerial competence (MQ), and emotional and social competence (EQ) and to explore relationships between leadership competence and IS. Design/methodology/approach -Based on 246 obtained responses to a questionnaire survey across infrastructure projects in the context of the Chinese urbanization process, the analysis of the relationships between top managers' leadership and IS was performed using a structural equation model (SEM). Findings -Results indicate that top managers' leadership competence, with MQ being the main determinant, followed by IQ, directly drives the entire life cycle of an infrastructure project toward accomplishing IS. Through positively influencing the moderate variable of MQ, EQ competence is found to have an indirect influence on IS. Practical implications -In terms of practical implications, the outcomes of this research will provide criteria for the selection of top managers for infrastructure projects to realize IS during the process of Chinese urbanization. Originality/value -The established SEM improves the leadership competence framework of IQ, MQ, and EQ in the respect of reflecting the context of infrastructure projects and promotes the research and development of leadership theory in the construction area.

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“…Goodness-of-fit (GOF) measures are an effective way to improve the fitness of an initial model [55]. After adding covariance error paths among observed variables or latent variables, the model showed a good fit and all of the GOF measures met recommended levels.…”

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“…The RMSEA value of 0.02, being less than 0.5, indicates that the final refined model is accepted with a very high level of confidence. Additionally, all of the relative indexes of NFI, RFI, IFI, TLI, and CFI are above 0.9, providing strong evidence for the acceptable fit between the measurement model and the data [56,[58][59][60]. Although the correlation setup in this study is according to the suggestions by the MI, the modifications are considered as theoretically and practically plausible.…”

“…[56,[58][59][60] As shown in Table 3, some main goodness-of-fit (GOF) measures, such as χ 2 /degrees of freedom (2.31 > 2), adjusted goodness-of-fit index (AGFI 0.807 < 0.9), and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA 0.073 > 0.05), were not achieved. Therefore, the SEM needed to be simplified and refined to satisfy both the theoretical expectations and the GOF measures.…”