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

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.