THE MEDIATING ROLE OF PRO-ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIOR BETWEEN ENVIRONMENTAL PASSION, RESPONSIBLE LEADERSHIP AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

Abstract

Environmental sustainability has become a crucial concern at the global level due to its devastating consequences on performance-related perspectives, as climate change and energy crisis have emerged as a burning issue. The objective is to address environmental sustainability while identifying the foremost factors, including environmental passion and responsible leadership, to predict the phenomenon of environmental sustainability. The researcher also highlighted the crucial need to imbue the behavioral aspect in determining environmental sustainability by developing Pro-environmental behavior as a significant mediator between exogenous and endogenous constructs. This study enriches the knowledge by expressing the role of environmental passion in predicting environmental sustainability. The knowledge is enhanced by expressing the association between leadership responsibility and environmental sustainability. Moreover, this research paper also incorporated Pro-environmental behavior as the mediator in establishing the relationship between environmental passion, responsible leadership and environmental sustainability. The data was collected randomly from different categories of SMEs, and Smart-PLS was used for analysis. Interesting findings have depicted that environmental passion predicts environmental sustainability and influences pro-environmental behavior; therefore, the hypotheses H1 and H2 are accepted. The findings also reported that responsible leadership predicts environmental sustainability and pro-environmental behavior, therefore, the hypotheses H3 and H4 are also accepted. The study also reported that responsible leadership is also crucial factor that enables firms to achieve environmental sustainability and establishes the pro-environmental behavior that establishes relationship between environmental passion, responsible leadership and environmental sustainability. This means hypotheses H5, H6 and H7 are statistically significant. This study focuses on increasing the sense of responsibility towards environmental sustainability by considering the crucial importance of pro-environmental behavior in determining and establishing the relationship between environmental passion and environmental sustainability, between responsible leadership and environmental sustainability.