Impact of Empowering Leadership, Innovative Work, and Organizational Learning Readiness on Sustainable Economic Performance: An Empirical Study of Companies in Russia during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Baira Faulks, Yinghua Song, Moses Waiganjo, Bojan Obrenovic and Danijela Godinic
Additional contact information
Baira Faulks: School of Management, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China
Yinghua Song: School of Management, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China
Moses Waiganjo: Business Management Department, Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST), Windhoek 51434, Namibia
Bojan Obrenovic: School of Management, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China
Danijela Godinic: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 22, 1-27

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic shocked the global economy, with numerous companies suffering losses and shutting down. However, some companies proved to be resilient, being able to sustain their economic performance despite the pandemic. The study aims to explain the sustainable economic performance of companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The relationships between empowering leadership, innovative work behavior, organizational readiness to change, and sustainable economic performance were assessed. The data were collected via an online questionnaire from January 2021 to March 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia. The respondents were Russian companies’ employees holding management positions, competent to objectively assess organizational circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic. A sample of 337 was used in the analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with maximum likelihood estimation was conducted using SPSS AMOS. The structural model was tested with standardized parameter estimates, standard errors, and p -values calculated. The findings of the study suggest that innovative work behavior and organizational readiness to learn have a direct influence on sustainable economic performance. The findings also suggest that empowering leadership impacts innovative work behavior but not sustainable economic performance. The mediation analysis indicates that innovative work behavior is a mediator between empowering leadership and sustainable economic performance, whereas organizational readiness to learn is not a moderator. The study adds to the leadership and sustainability body of knowledge and contributes to the research on the COVID-19 pandemic in the organizational context.

Keywords: empowering leadership; sustainable economic performance; COVID-19 pandemic; company performance during COVID-19; innovative work behavior; organizational readiness to learn (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/22/12465/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/22/12465/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:22:p:12465-:d:676956

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().