Balancing Act: How Paradoxical Leadership Enhances Environmental Leadership's Impact on Sustainability Performance

ABSTRACT This study investigates the influence of environmental leadership on sustainability performance and examines the moderating role of paradoxical leader behavior for this relationship. Drawing on paradox theory, the research explores how leaders balance competing economic, social, and environmental demands to enhance sustainability outcomes within public sector organizations in the UAE. Data were collected through a structured quantitative survey administered to employees of UAE‐based public sector organizations. Using a variance‐based structural equation modeling (SEM) approach with SmartPLS, the study assessed both measurement and structural models. Reliability, validity, and discriminant validity were confirmed, and hypotheses were tested through bootstrapping procedures with 5000 resamples to ensure robust estimations. The results reveal that environmental leadership has a significant positive effect on sustainability performance. Furthermore, paradoxical leader behavior strengthens this relationship, indicating that leaders capable of managing conflicting sustainability demands achieve superior performance outcomes. These findings extend prior research by empirically demonstrating that paradoxical leader behavior enhances the effectiveness of environmental leadership in achieving comprehensive sustainability performance across social, environmental, and economic dimensions. This study contributes to leadership and sustainability literature by integrating paradox theory into the environmental leadership framework. It introduces paradoxical leader behavior as a boundary condition that shapes the effectiveness of environmental leadership, offering a novel theoretical and empirical perspective on how leaders navigate tensions between environmental responsibilities and organizational goals.