Driving Sustainable Retention: A Collaborative Analysis of Transformational Leadership, Training, and Decent Work under SDG-8

Abstract

Given the changes in the work system, talent mobility, and employee expectations that were brought on by post-COVID-19, employee retention has emerged as a strategic sustainability concern, especially for service-sector organizations. This study uses Social Exchange Theory, Organizational Support Theory, and Transformational Leadership Theory as its foundation to examine how training and development (T&D) and transformational leadership (TL) influence employee retention (ER) through organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB), and how supportive work environment (SWE) as part of Sustainable Development Goal 8 moderates the process of developing citizenship behaviour. It is a quantitative, cross-sectional design, and the model has been tested using structural equation modelling (SEM) containing 384 participants from the service sector. The measurement model is reliable and valid, given that Cronbach's alpha values are between .858 to .884, composite reliability values are greater than .50, and the average variance extracted (AVE) values range from .899 to .915. The structural model accounts for 39.2% of the variance in OCB and 49.6% of the variance in ER. Factors that significantly predicted OCB were T&D (β = .330, p < .001) and TL (β = .312, p < .001). ER (β = .522, p < .001) was also highly correlated with OCB. SWE had a positive effect on T&D–OCB (β = .139, p = .001) and TL–OCB (β = .096, p = .027). Furthermore, bootstrapping showed that the relationship between T&D and ER and TL and ER were mediated by OCB. The study has implications for sustainable HRM as it demonstrates that training and leadership alone cannot lead to retention, but they can lead to citizenship behaviour when embedded in a decent, fair, and psychologically supportive work environment.

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