Hotels’ environmental leadership and employees’ organizational citizenship behavior

Abstract

• Environmental-transformational leadership positively affects environmental belief. • Organizational environmental policy helps employees have environmental belief. • Environmental training is an essential factor for employees’ environmental belief. • Employees’ environmental belief results in citizenship behavior toward the environment. • Environmental support boosts the effect of employees’ environmental belief on OCBE. Expanding on a stream of literature connecting employee motivation to environmental practices, this research investigated why hospitality employees participated in organizational citizenship behaviors related to company sustainability efforts. The results of this study suggest that employees’ environmental belief partially mediates the influences of both environmental-transformational leadership and environmental policies on organizational citizenship behavior toward the environment, while it fully mediates the association between environmental training and the outcome. The findings also demonstrate that employees’ perception of organizational support moderates the relationship between environmental belief and organizational citizenship behavior toward the environment. Pointedly, hospitality workers reported they were increasingly more likely to engage in ecologically friendly organizational citizenship behaviors as their environmental beliefs increased, and as such, organizational support moderated the association so that the more support received, the more likely workers would engage in such behaviors, and the less support received, the less likely they were to do so.