Decent Work Boosts Employee Well-Being, but Leadership Style May Not Matter in Nigerian Universities

Few questions in organizational psychology have become as urgent as the one asking what actually makes workers feel well at their jobs. A new study of public universities in southern Nigeria offers a strikingly nuanced answer: the quality of the work itself, defined through the internationally recognized framework of decent work, is significantly linked to employee well-being, yet a leadership style often heralded as transformative, sustainable leadership, does not meaningfully change that relationship. The finding, published in Discover Psychology by a team of researchers led by Desmond Oben Neji of the University of Port Harcourt, challenges an increasingly popular assumption in management science: that the right kind of leadership can amplify, or even rescue, the psychological benefits of good working conditions.

The research arrives at a moment when employee well-being has moved from the periphery of business scholarship to its center. Across the globe, scholars, administrators, and policymakers are paying closer attention to how workers feel, and for a pragmatic reason. As the study’s authors note, employees represent the vehicle through which enterprise goals are attained. When staff in universities, hospitals, firms, or government agencies are exhausted, insecure, or undervalued, organizational performance inevitably suffers. In academic settings, where lecturers and administrative staff carry heavy teaching loads, research expectations, and institutional service duties, the stakes of well-being are particularly high, because the quality of education delivered to students depends directly on the condition of the workforce that provides it.

At the heart of the study sits the concept of decent work, a framework with roots in international labor discourse that captures whether employment offers fair income, security in the workplace, social protection, opportunities for personal development, and the freedom to express concerns and organize. Decent work is not merely about pay. It is a multidimensional construct that measures whether a job treats people with dignity, whether conditions are safe, whether hours are reasonable, and whether workers see a future in what they do. In the Nigerian public university context, where funding pressures, staffing shortfalls, and industrial disputes have periodically disrupted academic life, assessing how decent work relates to the psychological state of employees carries clear practical significance.

The second key concept, sustainable leadership, describes a style of management that looks beyond short-term results. Sustainable leaders are expected to protect and renew their organizations over the long run, developing people, preserving institutional knowledge, acting ethically, and considering the broader social and environmental consequences of decisions. In recent years, an expanding literature has suggested that sustainable leadership can buffer employees against stress, strengthen engagement, and create conditions in which well-being flourishes. The Nigerian research team set out to test whether this popular claim holds in their setting: does sustainable leadership moderate, meaning strengthen or weaken, the statistical relationship between decent work and employee well-being?

To answer that question, the researchers adopted a positivist research philosophy, which in practice meant a deductive design: hypotheses were formulated in advance, and structured questionnaires were used to gather standardized data from a large sample of respondents. The research population comprised 7,962 employees drawn from eight public universities across the South-South and South-East geopolitical regions of Nigeria. Using Taro Yamane’s formula, a widely applied statistical method for determining sample size from a known finite population at a specified confidence level, the team calculated a required sample of 381 participants.

Sampling design matters enormously in studies of this kind, and the researchers chose a systematic sampling technique, selecting respondents at fixed intervals from an ordered list. This approach served two purposes. First, it ensured that enough academic departments were covered within each university, giving the sample breadth across disciplines and job roles. Second, it minimized bias in the distribution of respondents, reducing the risk that the results would overrepresent a single faculty, cadre, or institutional culture. Data analysis was carried out with two complementary software platforms: SPSS version 25.0 for descriptive and classical statistical procedures, and SmartPLS 4.1, a specialized package for structural equation modeling using partial least squares, which is well suited to testing how multiple constructs relate to one another and whether an interaction effect, such as moderation, is statistically significant.

The results were clear on the first question and sobering on the second. The analysis revealed that decent work has a significant relationship with employee well-being in the studied universities. In other words, when employees perceive their work as fair, secure, protective, and developmental, their self-reported well-being rises. This finding aligns with a broad body of occupational health psychology suggesting that the structural features of a job, not only individual dispositions, shape how workers feel. It also carries a direct implication for university administrators and Nigerian policymakers: investing in the tangible quality of employment, from fair remuneration to safe conditions and career development, is a measurable lever for improving the lives of academic staff.

The second finding, however, cuts against expectations. Sustainable leadership did not play any significant moderating role in the relationship between decent work and employee well-being. Statistically, this means that the strength of the link between good working conditions and well-being did not depend on how sustainably employees perceived their leaders to behave. Good work predicted well-being regardless of leadership style, and the presumed amplifying effect of sustainable leadership was absent. For the authors, this result is a caution against treating leadership variables as universal enhancers of every positive workplace relationship, and it suggests that in resource-constrained public institutions, the material and structural realities of employment may simply outweigh stylistic differences in how managers lead.

The study is, by its authors’ account, the first to investigate the relationship between decent work and employee well-being with sustainable leadership as a moderating variable in Nigerian public universities, which gives the null finding particular value. Negative and null results are underreported in management research, yet they are essential for correcting theoretical overreach. If sustainable leadership cannot strengthen the well-being effects of decent work in one large, carefully sampled public-sector context, researchers elsewhere should be prompted to test the boundary conditions of moderation models rather than assume they generalize across cultures, sectors, and economic circumstances. Replication in other regions of Nigeria and in other national settings would help determine whether the pattern is context-specific or more general.

The work was approved by the Research and Ethics Committee of the Department of Business Administration at Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, under protocol number DBA-ERC000138, and conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki, with informed consent obtained from all participants. The authors declare no competing interests and received no external funding. Published open access, the study invites scrutiny and reuse under a Creative Commons license. Its message for organizations is ultimately constructive: the surest path to a healthier workforce may run not through the personality or philosophy of leaders, but through the concrete, measurable decency of the jobs people are asked to do every day.

Subject of Research: The relationship between decent work, sustainable leadership, and employee well-being in Nigerian public universities

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

Article References: Neji, D. O., Edeh, F. O., Sam, T. H., Egwu, K. C., Lim, T. Y., Heng, C. H., Zayed, N. M., Ikpor, I. M., & Okwu, P. I. (2026). Moderating role of sustainable leadership in the relationship between decent work and employee well-being of selected public universities in southern Nigeria. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00861-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00861-x

Keywords: decent work, employee well-being, sustainable leadership, public universities, Nigeria, organizational psychology, structural equation modeling, academic staff, human resource management, workplace well-being, leadership studies, occupational health