Promotion or inhibition? Moral norms, anticipated emotion and employee’s pro-environmental behavior

Abstract

Through applying the dual inheritance theory to organizational context, the study constructed the systematic research model based on the relationship between moral norms, moral values and pro-environmental behavior, and interpreted the influence factors of employees’ pro-environmental behavior from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. The results revealed that effect mechanisms of the congruence between injunctive moral norms and moral values on employees’ intrinsical pro-environmental behavior and extrinsical pro-environmental behavior. Moreover, based on the thoughts that emotions embody the true content of individual adaptation psychology to norms in the process of behavior selection, both anticipated pride and anticipated guilt were incorporated into the above mechanisms and descriptive moral norm as the boundary condition for the congruence of “injunctive moral norms-moral values” to affect employees’ anticipated pride and anticipated guilt. Through investigating 954 employees of firms, the results showed that the congruence of “injunctive moral norms-moral values” promoted employees’ intrinsical pro-environmental behavior positively, anticipated pride and anticipated guilt mediated the relationship between the congruence of “injunctive moral norms-moral values” and intrinsical pro-environmental behavior. Descriptive moral norms negatively moderated the positive effect of congruence of “injunctive moral norms-moral values” and anticipated pride. The moderating effect of low descriptive moral norms was stronger than that of high descriptive moral norms in detailed. The results found some interesting insights, which were of great theoretical and managerial significance.