Toward a Guna-Based Leadership Framework: Integrating Indian Knowledge Systems with Psychological Safety as a Mediating Mechanism for Employee Well-Being: A Conceptual Development and Exploratory Model Study

Abstract

Employee well-being has emerged as a critical organisational priority in the context of global workplace stress, burnout, and disengagement. While transformational, ethical, and servant leadership models offer useful insights, they remain predominantly Western-centric and do not adequately address the intrinsic psychological dispositions grounded in Indian civilizational thought. Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) provide a refined psychological model through the Guna Theory, identifying three psychophysical forces—Sattva (harmony, clarity, compassion), Rajas (drive, ambition, activity), and Tamas (inertia, ignorance, aggression)—as described in the Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 14), Samkhya Karika, and Yoga Sutras.
This paper advances a Tri-Dimensional Guna-Based Leadership Framework as a conceptual contribution, positioning it explicitly as a scale development and exploratory simulation study rather than a claim of full empirical validation. We develop the Guna Leadership Scale (GLS) with theoretical anchors in classical IKS texts and propose psychological safety as the critical mediating mechanism between leadership gunas and employee well-being. Drawing on narrative archetypes—Lord Rama as a pure Satvic exemplar and King Vikramaditya as a Satvic-Rajasic hybrid—and using an exploratory simulation (N = 500) aligned with published psychometric benchmarks in organisational behaviour, we test structural plausibility through Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) using the lavaan R package.
Simulation results indicate theoretical consistency: Satvic leadership demonstrates a strong positive path to psychological safety (β = 0.633, p < .001), while Rajasic (β = −0.452) and Tamasic (β = −0.540) leadership exhibit negative effects. Psychological safety fully mediates the guna-well-being relationship (R² = 0.85). These findings are interpreted as exploratory and should be validated through real organisational samples. The paper concludes with a fully developed GLS instrument, implementation guidelines, and a future research roadmap calling for empirical EFA/CFA/SEM validation.