“ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN AMONG YOUNG ADULTS”THE ROLE OF ENVIRONMENTALLY SPECIFIC TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP.

Abstract

India, along with other developing nations, is currently experiencing an industrial revolution. Global carbon emissions are increasing at an alarming pace. Organizations in all sectors must implement measures to address this escalating issue. Accordingly, organizations must include green concepts in their operational strategy to achieve environmental sustainability. However, creating and implementing green initiatives depend to some extent on organizational leaders. Therefore, an impressive body of research has started investigating environmental-specific leadership. The importance of environmental concern in this relationship is rarely discussed, even though the research shows a connection between students' green behavior and environmentally specific transformational leadership. Scholarly research explaining the connection between students' environmentally conscious green activities and transformational leadership that is tailored to the specific needs of the environment is scarce. This study, therefore, studied the possible mediating effect of environmental concern in relation to environmentally specific transformational leadership and green behavior at Universities and HEIs among a sample of 302 students from various universities and HEIs in Delhi and NCR. The results of structural equation modelling indicate that environmentally specific transformational leadership significantly positively correlates with environmental concern, which positively predicts students' green behavior after controlling for age and gender. The findings also showed that the association between environmentally specific transformational leadership and green behavior was mediated by environmental concern. The findings of this study have implications for both research and practice.