Moderating role of sustainable leadership in the relationship between decent work and employee well-being of selected public universities in southern Nigeria

The well-being of employees at the workplace is increasingly receiving attention from scholars, administrators, and policymakers across the globe. One of the reasons why employee well-being has dominated business research is that employees represent the vehicle through which enterprise goals are attained. It is based on this relevance that this study investigates the moderating role of sustainable leadership in the relationship between decent work and employee well-being in Nigerian public universities. The study employed a positivist approach to research, which necessitated a deductive study and a structured questionnaire to collect data from the respondents. The research setting covers public universities in Nigeria, from which a population of 7962 was drawn from eight (8) public universities across the South–South and South–East regions of the country. Taro Yamane’s formula was used to obtain a sample size of 381. The systematic sampling technique was employed to ensure that enough departments were covered per university and to minimise bias in the distribution. The analyses of the study were aided by SPSS 25.0 and SmartPLS 4.1. The study revealed that decent work has a significant relationship with employee well-being. The study also found that sustainable leadership does not play any significant role in the relationship between decent work and employee well-being. This research is novel and relevant because no study has investigated the relationship between decent work and employee well-being with sustainable leadership as a moderating variable in the Nigerian public universities.