Lam D. Le

Type of the article: Research Article

Higher education institutions face a dual imperative: accelerating digital transformation while advancing sustainability commitments. For academic staff, these agendas converge in a single psychological space, yet leadership research has largely treated digital leadership and sustainable leadership as parallel paradigms. This study examines how both styles concurrently shape lecturers’ job involvement, and whether person-organization (P-O) fit acts as a common mechanism linking them to role investment. Grounded in Social Exchange Theory, Job Demands-Resources Theory, and Person-Environment Fit Theory, an integrated structural model was tested on survey data from a non-probability sample of 312 full-time lecturers in selected Vietnamese public and private universities using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Results show that digital leadership exerts both a direct positive effect on job involvement (β = 0.333) and an indirect effect via P-O fit, while sustainable leadership strongly enhances P-O fit (β = 0.663) but has a non-significant direct path to job involvement, revealing a fully mediated, value-lagged structure. P-O fit emerges as the central gateway (β = 0.488) through which both leadership styles activate job involvement, with the model explaining 70.4% of its variance. The study contributes by integrating two leadership paradigms within a unified framework, conceptualizing P-O fit as a dynamic mediating process shaped by leadership behaviors, and foregrounding job involvement as a strategically important outcome driven by these dual leadership orientations. Practical implications point to the design of integrated leadership development and fit-focused HR practices in higher education institutions, navigating concurrent digital and sustainability transitions.