Sustainable leadership: An empirical investigation of its effect on organizational effectiveness1

Abstract

AbstractThe concept of sustainable leadership is increasingly gaining popularity among organizational scholars. However, empirical evidences for the effectiveness of sustainable leadership are still lacking. This study investigated whether and how diverse elements of sustainable leadership influence the effectiveness of organization. Analyzing the large data collected from the employees of diverse U.S. federal agencies, this study found that sustainable leadership practices explained a significant variance of diverse aspects of organizational effectiveness. However, the different elements of sustainable leadership influenced the different aspects of organizational effectiveness to a different degree. The results showed that the relative strengths of the effects of each element of sustainable leadership differed across different aspects of organizational effectiveness. For example, promoting work/life balance was the most significant predictors of employee satisfaction, while its effect diminished when investigated against other aspects of organizational effectiveness.