Abstract
The paradigm shift in corporate environmentalism indicates the influx of dynamic, sophisticated, yet energy-efficient green production/management practices across global business firms. Even though there is radical growth in the studies encompassing employee green-behavior, a scarcity of work exists on how employee empowerment on environmental matters enables employees' environmental-organization citizenship behavior. Therefore, the current study initially analyzes how green employee empowerment, which is the autonomy at work for eco-related tasks, delegating accountability, and encouraging employee participation in environmental decision-making, independently enhances environmental-organization citizenship behavior (measured in terms of eco-initiatives, eco-civic engagement and eco-helping behavior) of 542 service-sector employees in India. Further, the mediation analysis reveals that employees' environmental commitment and green job satisfaction positively, parallelly and partially mediate the significant direct relationship of green empowerment on environmental-organization citizenship behavior, a newly tested phenomenon. Additionally, this work establishes the moderation effect of ‘individual green values’ of employees within technology-enabled service industries, wherein the indirect effects of green empowerment on the dependent variable through both mediators are more significant at higher levels of the moderator, supporting the moderated-mediation hypotheses. The model offers premium theoretical insights into self-determination theory, and supplies-values fit theory by contributing a new variable, “employee green empowerment” which has not been empirically established in green-behavior literature. Also, by integrating environmental management into the human resource management (employee empowerment) domain, the model practically encourages management/policy-makers to promote environmental autonomy for enhancing employees’ green attitude and eco-behavior, thereby meeting organizational environmental sustainability goals.
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Data availability statement
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We sincerely thank the Centre for Research, Anna University, Chennai, for the financial assistance throughout our research.
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This research work is funded by the Centre for Research, Anna University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu- 600025, under GRANT NO. CFR/ACRF-2018/AR1/28.
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Author 1 (V.N. Amrutha)—Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Methodology; Software; Validation; Visualization; Roles/Writing—original draft; Writing—review & editing.
Author 2 (S.N.Geetha)—Conceptualization; Data curation; Funding acquisition; Project administration; Resources; Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Roles/Writing—review & editing.
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This research involved a questionnaire survey of service sector employees in India. The questionnaire and methodology for this study were approved by the Research Ethics Doctoral Committee (ethical standards of Ph.D. regulations mentioned for 1825991111/Ph.D./AR10 of the University), constituted by the Centre for research, Anna University, Chennai, as per Clause 12.1 of Ph.D. Regulations. The authors declare that no clinical trials involving human subjects were undertaken for this study.
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Highlights
• Green empowerment positively predicts environmental citizenship behavior.
• Environmental commitment and Job satisfaction are parallel mediators in the model.
• Age and experience are used as control variables.
• Individual green values significantly act as a moderator in the proposed model.
• Theoretical and practical implications of our moderated-mediation model projected.
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Amrutha, V.N., Geetha, S.N. Green employee empowerment for environmental organization citizenship behavior: a moderated parallel mediation model. Curr Psychol 43, 5685–5702 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04720-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04720-z