The Effect of Leadership on Employee Mental Health: Focus on the Online Education Industry

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-916-2_54How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Employee Mental Health; Online Education; Transformational Leadership; Passive Leadership

Abstract

The paper investigates how various leadership styles relate to employee mental health in the online education industry, employing a combination of the theories conservation of resources, transformational leadership, and passive leadership. The research sample comprises 318 staff members from the online education industry. Research hypotheses are the following: First, transformational leadership is associated with substantial, positive impact on employees’ psychological well-being; second, passive leadership shows a clear negative relationship with employee mental health; third, employees’ length of service moderates these effects, such that longer tenure diminishes transformational leadership’s benefits toward mental well-being. SPSS was used to conduct reliability tests, regression analysis, and correlation analysis on the data. Confirmatory factor analysis was performed on the dataset using Amos. The outcomes show transformational leadership as having a substantially positive relationship with employee mental health, with |β|=0.5. Passive leadership exhibits a substantially negative relationship with employee mental health, with R=-0.467. Employee tenure plays substantial moderating function with regard to transformational leadership’s relationship with mental health, with coefficients of |β| = 0.500 in Model 1 and |β| = 0.494 in Model 2. As tenure increases, leadership’s positive influence on employees’ psychological well-being tends to diminish. Accordingly, organizations may enhance both leadership effectiveness and employee mental health by adopting flexible and adaptive workplace policies.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Huaning Shi
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/22
TI  - The Effect of Leadership on Employee Mental Health: Focus on the Online Education Industry
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 4th International Conference on Public Service, Economic Management and Sustainable Development (PESD 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 512
EP  - 520
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-916-2_54
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-916-2_54
ID  - Shi2025
ER  -