Testing the Competency-Behavior Link: Sustainability Learning Outcomes Among Accounting Professionals in Sri Lanka

This study challenges the conception that competencies acquired through sustainability learning (SL) automatically lead to pro-sustainable behaviour (PSB) and empirically tests how sustainability competencies translate into behaviour through mediation by individual and group attributes. Drawing on the Key Competency Framework and integrating behavioural perspectives from the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), Norm Activation Model (NAM), and Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory, this study develops and tests a mediated competency–behaviour model. Specifically, this research examines the five key sustainability competencies identified by Wiek et al. (2011), systems thinking, anticipatory thinking, normative thinking, strategic thinking, and interpersonal thinking, and pathways to PSB through attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control, personal norms, and biospheric values. An empirical study was conducted among accounting professionals in Sri Lanka (n = 198) using a structured online questionnaire, and data were analysed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). The results revealed a statistically significant effect of normative thinking, strategic thinking and interpersonal thinking on PSB through behavioural mediators, with no significant effect of systems thinking and anticipatory thinking. These findings highlight that sustainability competencies do not uniformly translate into behaviour and indicate the importance of behavioural activation mechanisms in converting learning outcomes into practice.