How Environmental Knowledge Management Promotes Employee Green Behavior: An Empirical Study.

Wenyao Zhang,Wei Zhang,Yuan Jiang,Ruzhi Xu

doi:10.3390/ijerph18094738

Abstract

As environmental protection has gradually become the focus of enterprises’ development, employee green behavior becomes an important and key antecedent to study this issue, but there have been less studies conducted with knowledge management. As a result, drawing on the theory of planned behavior and the organizational support theory, this study investigates how environmental knowledge practices (environmental knowledge sharing and environmental knowledge application) affect employee green behavior by using a questionnaire survey administered to 266 employees in China to reveal their complex relationship mechanism. The results show that environmental knowledge application and environmental knowledge sharing have a positive effect on employee green behavior; environmental behavioral intention mediates the relationship between environmental knowledge application and employee green behavior, and between environmental knowledge sharing and employee green behavior; green perceived organizational support positively moderates the relationship between environmental behavioral intention and employee green behavior. The findings shed new light on the development of employee green behavior literature and provide practical reference for strategies related to environmental protection for managers.

Highlights

As public concern about environmental protection has been growing in recent years [1,2], many organizations and institutes have raised awareness of environmental practices by adapting their businesses to take charge of appropriate natural resource management and environmental management [3,4]
Green perceived organizational support positively moderates the relationship between environmental behavioral intention and employee green behavior
Our results indicated that environmental knowledge application (r = 0.46, p < 0.01), environmental knowledge sharing (r = 0.44, p < 0.01), environmental behavioral intention (r = 0.42, p < 0.01), and green perceived organizational support (r = 0.30, p < 0.01) were positively correlated with employee green behavior

Summary

Introduction

As public concern about environmental protection has been growing in recent years [1,2], many organizations and institutes have raised awareness of environmental practices by adapting their businesses to take charge of appropriate natural resource management and environmental management [3,4]. Existing scholars have studied EGB from different perspectives, such as green organizational climate [11,12], education [13,14], leadership [15], green human resource management (GHRM) practices [16], corporate social responsibility (CSR) [17,18], corporate environmental strategy [19,20,21], environmental servant leadership [22], and beliefs and attitudes [23,24]. Tian et al (2020) investigated the relationship between EGB and pro-environmental attitude and how perception of green work climate affects EGB [24].

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion