Linking Empowering Leadership and Organizational Citizenship Behavior Toward Environment: The Role of Psychological Ownership and Future Time Perspective.

Meiqin Jiang,Huaying Wang,Mingze Li

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02612

Abstract

Organizations are confronted with increasing social responsibility to contribute to environmental sustainability. Employee organizational citizenship behavior toward the environment (OCBE) is considered essential to organizational environment performance. Drawing upon the theory of psychological ownership, the study investigated the effects of empowering leadership on employee OCBE by a sample of 374 employees in China. With the use of the bootstrapping technique in SPSS 25 to test our proposed moderated mediation model, results demonstrated a positive relationship between empowering leadership and OCBE through the mechanism of employee psychological ownership. Further, we found that the indirect effect is stronger when employees hold high rather than low future time perspectives. The theoretical implications for sustainability literature and practical implications for organizations striving for environmental sustainability are discussed.

Highlights

With the glowing social concern about the environmental consequence of corporations, environmental sustainability is an inevitable consideration and a social responsibility in organizational settings (Starik and Marcus, 2000; Aguinis and Glavas, 2012; Kim et al, 2017)
We propose that empowering leadership might engender employee psychological ownership by offering participation, autonomy, responsibility, and expression of confidence in followers (Ahearne et al, 2005; Zhang and Bartol, 2010), which in turn motivates employee organizational citizenship behavior toward the environment (OCBE)
Employee OCBEs are considered essential to organizational environment performance

Summary

Introduction

With the glowing social concern about the environmental consequence of corporations, environmental sustainability is an inevitable consideration and a social responsibility in organizational settings (Starik and Marcus, 2000; Aguinis and Glavas, 2012; Kim et al, 2017). Because of external and internal concerns and the benefits of pro-environmental behaviors, organizations paid much attention to the development of environmental policy, and green human resource management practices (Smith and O’Sullivan, 2012), in which the top-down strategic initiatives for sustainability have been addressed. Only when individual employees actively respond to and support the strategic initiatives in the organizational level can the environment policy and advocacy be implemented (Daily et al, 2009; Jenkin et al, 2011a). Individual employees may initiate and champion environmental sustainability in work situations (Paillé et al, 2013), and their contribution is vital to an organization’s environmental sustainability (Dilchert and Ones, 2012; Lulfs and Hahn, 2013). Managers care about how to stimulate individual employees’ participation in environmental sustainability

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Discussion

Conclusion