Test of Multilevel Influences on Green Workplace Behaviour

Corresponding to public concern about the long-term consequences of environmental degradation and climate change, companies globally are proactively striving to improve environmental responsibility and stewardship and sustainable organizations via using “green” organizational practices and individual green workplace behaviours, i.e. pro-environmental actions taken by individual employees.
The daily behaviours of individual employees can contribute to firm environmental performance by helping to minimize pollution, ensure materials are recycled, and reducing energy use. A vast majority of organizational greening efforts rely on voluntary employee participation in greening activities and behaviours, yet few employers systematically measure and monitor such green workplace behaviour, or include it in formal performance appraisal or incentive schemes.
Despite its centrality in improving firm environmental performance, organizational scholars have only recently begun investigating the factors that explain the occurrence of voluntary green workplace behaviour, and in an effort to contribute to this nascent field, this project investigates the psychological and social antecedents of voluntary green workplace behaviour. Building on prior conceptual work, the model to be tested (see Figure 1, below) integrates the organizational citizenship and environmental psychology literatures to view green workplace behaviour as a type of organizational citizenship behaviour.
Data Collection. Is to be undertaken – in order to test the cultural generalizability of an existing (Korean) model. Data will be collected from several companies. Companies will be selected from several different industries with the requirement that a minimum of 5 work groups are available to participate. In each country, the goal is to obtain data from the leaders and members of at least 50 work groups employed in office settings, and ranging in size from 4 to approximately 20 people. Participants will be asked to complete surveys in their native language on site at their place of employment. Back-translation procedures will be used to ensure compatibility between the original English-language survey items and the translated items. To increase the ability to draw inferences about causality, data will be collected at two points in time separated by approximately two weeks.
Surveys may include items that represent a combination of established measures and items developed in collaboration with human resource (HR) managers in the participating companies, who could help ensure that the survey is site-appropriate and comprehensive. The established measures may include moral attentiveness, assessed using five items and conscientiousness, using a four-item measure from the Mini International Personality Item Pool (Mini-IPIP). To assess the voluntary green workplace behaviour of leaders and group members, a combination of items might be used, as prior pilot work indicates that these items form two scales matching the constructs of interest.
Importance. Results from this project will suggest possible actions for individual managers and HR professionals to take to build organizations that are likely to evolve toward becoming more environmentally friendly (e.g., such as selecting new hires using information about personality characteristics, and training managers to effectively model green workplace behaviours), contribute to an improved understanding of the more general phenomenon of organizational citizenship behaviour, and investigate the multi-level and cross-level social dynamics that shape staff citizenship behaviours in organizational settings.
Benefits to host, the discipline, the applicant and the home institution
The host institution may benefit from increasing: the research productivity and visibility of individual students on the projects described and the university’s current focus on internationalization; the discipline from the new knowledge gained from these projects, and indirectly by demonstrating the feasibility and value of research at the intersection of environmental sustainability and management. In addition to serving as a positive model for a young scholar, this project could grow into a larger-scale collaborative stream of research that will eventually engage both senior and junior management scholars in international collaborations aimed at understanding and encouraging corporate environmental sustainability.