The Influence of Public Servants’ Perceived Formalism and Organizational Environmental Strategy on Green Behavior in the Workplace

Hsiang-Te Liu

doi:10.3390/su131911020

Abstract

This study explored the influence of public servants’ green attitude, green behavior intention, organization environmental strategy, green lifestyle, and formalism on green behavior. For Taiwan’s government agencies, environmental protection and sustainable development issues must be inculcated into government organizations and deeply ingrained into the mindset of civil servants. In particular, this research incorporates the concept of ‘formalism’ proposed by Riggs in administrative ecology. Exploration of the influence of civil servants’ cognition of formalism on green behavior has not been explored in any previous studies. This study collected 308 valid public servants who worked in the public sector in Taiwan and used Lisrel and SEM to justify the hypotheses explored. The results showed that civil servants’ green attitude positively affected green intention, as well as the fact that green behavior intention, organization environmental strategy, and green lifestyle positively affected green behavior. The current study also confirmed that formalism negatively affected green behavior. Formalism is considered to be an important attribute of developing administration, and it is also considered to be a resistance to the adoption of administrative innovation. This study first confirmed the negative impact of formalism on the green behavior of civil servants.

Highlights

The behavior of human beings has always been a major shaping factor for climate change and ecological catastrophes [1]
This study confirmed that green attitude positively affected green behavioral intention [8,60,61,62,63,64,65]
When civil servants have a positive attitude towards policies and courses of action about organizational environmental sustainability, their green behavioral intentions will increase

Summary

Introduction

The behavior of human beings has always been a major shaping factor for climate change and ecological catastrophes [1]. International organizations and government agencies must come up with clear environmental protection strategies to encourage and support their employees to act in a way that is environmentally friendly [2]. Environmental sustainability issues are always included in the organization’s strategic planning [3]. To reduce negative impact on the environment and ecologies, organizational environmental strategy includes visions, goals, plans, and courses of action that are environmentally friendly [4]. Environmental strategy strengthens the voluntary green behavior of an organization’s members through resource reuse, energy conservation, and waste reduction [5]. It has often been believed that employees’ voluntary green behavior is key to an organization’s ability to promote environmental protection [1]. It becomes difficult to formulate an organization’s sustainability strategy [7]. How government agencies’ environmental strategies affect civil servants’ green behavior, where these strategies exert influence in society, has not been widely discussed

Objectives

Results

Conclusion