Relação entre Estilos de Liderança e Desempenho ESG em Cooperativas de Crédito: O Efeito Moderador da Legitimidade Organizacional

Abstract

This dissertation aimed to investigate how leadership styles influence ESG performance in credit unions, while considering the moderating effect of organizational legitimacy, from the perspective of the Upper Echelons Theory. The originality of the research lies in the simultaneous articulation of transactional and transformational leadership styles, ESG performance, and organizational legitimacy in the context of credit unions, where these constructs have still been addressed in isolation, only partially, or in other types of organizations. Its relevance stems from the need to analyze managerial factors associated with environmental, social, and governance performance in organizations that combine financial activities, cooperative principles, and community engagement. The research is structured into three articles. The first consisted of a systematic literature review guided by the PRISMA protocol, covering publications from 2014 to 2025 in the Scopus, SciELO, Web of Science, and Spell databases, resulting in the selection of 22 studies. The second and third articles adopted a quantitative and descriptive approach, with a questionnaire administered to managers at a credit union. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis, and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling, with the support of the SmartPLS® software. The combination of the systematic review and the two empirical studies represents the methodological contribution by integrating the mapping of scientific production with the testing, through PLS-SEM, of the direct effects of leadership styles and the moderating effect of organizational legitimacy. The review results indicated that scientific production was concentrated in recent years, especially between 2023 and 2025, with a predominance of studies on leadership and ESG and limited integration of organizational legitimacy into this relationship, particularly in the context of credit unions. The empirical studies showed that transactional and transformational leadership positively influence ESG performance, with transformational leadership exerting a stronger effect than transactional leadership. Organizational legitimacy, however, did not exert a significant moderating effect on this relationship. Theoretically, the findings provide empirical evidence consistent with the assumptions of Upper Echelons Theory in the context of credit unions, demonstrating that different managerial leadership styles are differently associated with ESG performance and that organizational legitimacy did not have a significant moderating effect on this relationship. In practical terms, they support the assessment of leadership styles and the development of managerial training programs aimed at strengthening ESG performance.