Green Project Leadership and Sustainable Project Outcomes at Universities of Balochistan: The Mediating Role of Green Knowledge Sharing and the Moderating Role of Organizational Environmental Culture

Abstract

Pressure on higher education institutions to align their operations and development projects with international sustainability goals is growing. This research is an in-depth study of the relationship between Green Project Leadership (GPL) and Sustainable Project Outcomes (SPO) in Universities in Balochistan. This study reviewed environmental leadership and knowledge management literature and tested a moderated mediation model using a quantitative, cross-sectional design. Data were collected from 208 academic, administrative, and technical staff engaged in university projects. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and bootstrapping analyses (n=5000) indicate that Green Knowledge Sharing (GKS) partially mediates the relationship between GPL and SPO (Indirect Effect = 0.3617). The interaction of University Environmental Culture (UEC) and GPL in predicting GKS was marginally significant, but a bootstrapped index of moderated mediation revealed that this conditional pattern falls just below conventional levels of significance (Index = -0.0302, 95% CI [-0.0710, 0.0022]). This suggests that the substitutive effect of institutional culture on leadership-driven knowledge sharing represents a trend that requires further investigation, but it is not an established fact. Supplementary analyses found no effects of gender or project role and no multicollinearity (all of the VIFs were < 3.3). These results, although constrained by the cross-sectional variance (Harman's single factor = 68.49%), bring policy implications for institutionalising sustainability in higher education sectors in the developing economy.