The Effects of Job Insecurity, Emotional Exhaustion, and Met Expectations on Hotel Employees’ Pro-Environmental Behaviors: Test of a Serial Mediation Model

Abstract

There are a plethora of empirical pieces about employees’ pro-environmental behaviors. However, the extant literature has either ignored or not fully examined various factors (e.g., negative or positive non-green workplace factors) that might affect employees’ pro-environmental behaviors. Realizing these voids, the present paper proposes and tests a serial mediation model that examines the interrelationships of job insecurity, emotional exhaustion, met expectations, and proactive pro-environmental behavior. We used data gathered from hotel customer-contact employees with a time lag of one week and their direct supervisors in China. After presenting support for the psychometric properties of the measures via confirmatory analysis in LISREL 8.30, the abovementioned linkages were gauged using the PROCESS plug-in for statistical package for social sciences. The findings delineated support for the hypothesized associations. Specifically, emotional exhaustion and met expectations partly mediated the effect of job insecurity on proactive pro-environmental behavior. More importantly, emotional exhaustion and met expectations serially mediated the influence of job insecurity on proactive pro-environmental behavior. These findings have important theoretical implications as well as significant implications for diminishing job insecurity, managing emotional exhaustion, increasing met expectations, and enhancing eco-friendly behaviors.