Abstract
Organizational management practices in promoting sustainable development of the ecological environment are becoming a crucial way for enterprises to gain competitive advantages. However, whether the goal of such practices can be achieved depends on employees’ perception of environmental problems and the way they act. Therefore, it is important to stimulate employees’ pro-environment behaviors through management activities. Building on affective events theory and self-determination theory, we examined the effect of environmentally specific transformational leadership on employees’ pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs), as well as the potential mediating effects of environmental passion and autonomous motivation. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 214 employees in China. Structural equation modeling was performed to test the theory-driven models. The results showed that environmentally specific transformational leadership positively predicted employees’ PEBs, and that environmental passion and autonomous motivation mediated this relationship, respectively. Furthermore, multiple-mediating testing results showed that environmental passion and autonomous motivation played sequential mediating roles in the link of environmentally specific transformational leadership to PEBs. This research unveiled environmental passion and autonomous motivation as underlying mechanisms that accounted for the link between transformational leadership and PEBs.
Highlights
In recent years, as the ecological environment becomes increasingly worse, more and more enterprises begin to pay attention to and participate in the management practices of environmental problems (Ahmad, 2015)
After comparing the two simple mediating effects, the current study showed that there was no significant difference between the two indirect effects sizes, which indicated that compared with the emotional arousal path, the motivation stimulation path played the same role in linking leadership style with employees’ pro-environment behaviors (PEBs)
The evidence this study provided implied that the positive environmental emotional experience aroused by the environmentally specific transformational leadership could further promote the internalization of environmental motivation, which in turn motivate environmentally friendly behaviors
Summary
As the ecological environment becomes increasingly worse, more and more enterprises begin to pay attention to and participate in the management practices of environmental problems (Ahmad, 2015). When employees realize the seriousness and importance of environmental problems and perform corresponding environmental protection actions, the intuitive benefit is to reduce the waste of resources and save operating costs, and the ultimate benefit is to improve the organization’s environmental performance and obtain competitive advantages (Del Brío et al, 2007; Boiral et al, 2015). Given these widespread effects, it is hardly surprising that many researchers have recognized and called for empirical research to foster employees’ workplace PEBs within organizations (Norton et al, 2017; Robertson and Carleton, 2018). There is a lack of research on this issue in the Chinese context where environmental issues are salient to organizations today
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