The Effect of Socially Responsible HRM on Organizational Citizenship Behavior for the Environment: A Proactive Motivation Model

Junqian He,Hyosun Kim

doi:10.3390/su13147958

Abstract

Many organizations face the important challenges of motivating employees effectively to participate in corporate social responsibility initiatives and maintaining socially responsible human resource management practices. We examine whether socially responsible human resource management (SRHRM) practices can affect employees’ social responsibility-related behaviors, such as organizational citizenship behavior for the environment (OCBE). Based on proactive motivation theory, we propose a multiple-mediation model, selecting moral efficacy, felt obligation, and empathy as the mediators. We analyzed data from a sample of 535 employees from 23 manufacturing companies in China. The results show that SRHRM practices have a significant positive effect on OCBE. We also found that moral efficacy, felt obligation, and empathy significantly mediate the effect of SRHRM practices on OCBE and that there is no significant difference among the three mediation paths. Our study suggests that organizational pursuit of the socially responsible human resource management practices is an effective pathway to make employees feel more responsible toward global sustainability.

Highlights

As environmental sustainability has become central to the survival and development of organizations in the 21st century, corporate environmental responsibility (CER), an important area of corporate social responsibility (CSR), has become an issue of widely shared concern in academia [1,2]
We found that moral efficacy, felt obligation, and empathy significantly mediate the effect of socially responsible human resource management (SRHRM) practices on organizational citizenship behavior for the environment (OCBE) and that there is no significant difference among the three mediation paths
We propose that SRHRM practices provide an important social process that affects proactive motivational states of employees, antecedents to OCBE

Summary

Introduction

As environmental sustainability has become central to the survival and development of organizations in the 21st century, corporate environmental responsibility (CER), an important area of corporate social responsibility (CSR), has become an issue of widely shared concern in academia [1,2]. Ones and Dilchert [2] found that only 13% to 29% of employees’ environmental behaviors in Europe and the United States were based on organizational requirements, indicating that CER implementation depends on the organization’s rules and regulations and on employees’ proactive participation in environmental behaviors [3]. As environmental behavior is closely related to CER at the individual level, it is highly important to study the formation mechanism of OCBE for the sustainable development of both organizations and the environment. Previous empirical studies focusing on the antecedents of OCBE at the organizational level have found that corporate environmental policy, environmental management practices, and strategic human resource management have a positive impact on employees’

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