The Interplay between Corporate Social Responsibility at Employee Level, Ethical Leadership, Quality of Work Life and Employee Pro-Environmental Behavior: The Case of Healthcare Organizations

Edina Molnár,Amir Ikram,Asif Mahmood,Shah Ali Murtaza,Naveed Ahmad

doi:10.3390/ijerph18094521

Abstract

The notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been around for many decades. However, even in 2021, its spectrum is still evolving. Several studies addressed CSR for realizing different organizational outcomes. However, its significance in achieving employee-related consequences is relatively new to the literature. In the same manner, it is not clear from existing literature how ethical leaders can impact their followers’ CSR-related behavior, for example, employee pro-environmental behavior (EPB). With this background, the current study aims to explore the relationship of CSR at the employee level (CSR-E) with EPB through the mediating effect of ethical leadership (ELS) in the healthcare sector of a developing economy. This study also proposes a conditional indirect effect of quality of work-life (QWL) in this relationship. The data for the current study were obtained from different hospitals located in a large city through a self-administered questionnaire. The data were examined through the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The results validated that CSR-E positively influences EPB, and ELS partially mediates this relationship. Furthermore, the results also confirmed the presence of the conditional indirect effect of QWL in the proposed relationship of the current study. These findings will be helpful for healthcare policymakers to enhance the pro-environmental behavior of employees at the workplace through CSR-E and ELS. These results will also be helpful in reducing the overall environmental footprint of a hospital.

Highlights

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is perhaps one of the key concepts in the business environment, and it has dominated almost every sector
The current study argues that the ethical behavior of a leader helps shape employee pro-environmental behavior
As per the guidelines of Harman, if the output of single-factor analysis validates a single-factor that shares a variance of 50% or more, it is established that the data calls for some serious attention by the researcher to take care of the issue of common method bias (CMB)

Summary

Introduction

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is perhaps one of the key concepts in the business environment, and it has dominated almost every sector. The phenomenon of CSR has received considerable attention from scholars and practitioners as CSR practices have affected almost every organization in different industries [1]. The topic of CSR received less attention, but different environment-related issues like climate change [2,3] and global warming [4] forced businesses to adopt sustainability practices to reduce their environmental footprint. CSR has been regarded as a prerequisite for every sector due to several reasons [6]. Well-established organizations dedicate significant financial resources to CSR activities

Methods

Results

Conclusion