Leadership Styles and Organizational Commitment: Driving the Sustainable Development Practice Adoption in Online Higher Education Institutions through an Intention as a Mediator

Sustainability development practices currently is a pressing issue in many organizations and are gaining wide attention across the words. This study aims to evaluate the direct and indirect relationships among leadership style, organizational commitment, intention, and adoption of sustainable development practices among employees of distance learning higher education institutions in Malaysia. Presently, in Malaysia, the adoption of sustainable development practices among online distance learning higher education institutions is still at not very encouraging level and much improvement needs to be done to increase the level of adoption. In this study, primary data was employed and a survey questionnaire, which was adapted from previous research studies, was utilized for data gathering. The data analysis involved 392 clean data which was analyzed using structural equation modeling. Firstly, the measurement model was evaluated to determine the convergent validity by examining the construct reliability and validity. The discriminant validity was then assessed and verified using cross-loading and Hetrotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratios. The structural model was then evaluated and the hypothesis testing indicated that leadership style and organizational commitment have a significant positive direct relationship with intention and adoption. Further, intention significantly mediates the relationship between leadership style and