How customers matter to tourism employees’ green creative behavior?

Abstract

Albeit customers can contribute to the organization through co-creating value, research has been relatively missing about how customers contribute to organizational sustainability by driving employees, especially in the tourism industry, to undertake green creative endeavors. Our inquiry aims to unpack how and when involving customers in green programs can activate tourism employees’ green creative behavior. Employees and managers from tour companies in an Asia-Pacific market context provided the survey responses, which were put through structural equation analysis. The results revealed that tourism employees’ green role identity and green creative self-efficacy functioned as a dual mediation pathway to link customer green involvement to green creative behavior among tourism employees. Organizational green culture played a moderating role for the impacts of customer green involvement on employee green role identity and green creative self-efficacy. This study advances the stream of green behavior scholarship by unfolding the mechanisms to explain how involving customers can stimulate tourism employees to generate and implement novel green service solutions.