Environmental considerations as a basis for employee pro-environmental behaviour

Angela Ruepert and Linda Steg

Chapter 6 in Research Handbook on Employee Pro-Environmental Behaviour, 2018, pp 106-127 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Organisations are increasingly recognising that environmental problems will reduce if their employees act more pro-environmentally. However, pro-environmental behaviour (at home or at work) generally implies a conflict between immediate gratifications or financial gains and long-term benefits for the environment. Yet, despite this, people are motivated to act pro-environmentally when they are focused on benefiting the environment. In this chapter, we discuss a conceptual framework to understand, predict and promote pro-environmental behaviour at work. We identify two main factors affecting pro-environmental actions: the values people endorse and contextual factors. We propose that people are more likely to act pro-environmentally at work when they strongly endorse biospheric values. Biospheric values influence behaviour by strengthening the environmental self-identity and personal norms to act pro-environmentally at work. Yet, contextual factors can prevent (or promote) people acting upon their personal norms. Contextual factors may not only inhibit or enable pro-environmental behaviour at work, but they can also affect the extent to which people focus on benefiting the environment, which affects pro-environmental actions. People are more likely to act pro-environmentally when the context makes them focus on the environment, even more so when people have relatively weak biospheric values.

Keywords: Business and Management; Environment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781786432827/9781786432827.00012.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:17432_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().