Arousing employee pro-environmental behavior: A synergy effect of environmentally specific transformational leadership and green human resource management

Abstract

Employee proactive pro-environmental behavior (PEB) has been increasingly emphasized as an essential behavior benefiting the environment and organizational sustainability. Nevertheless, both scholars and practitioners need a fuller yet nuanced understanding of the antecedents and boundary condition of PEB. Drawing from theories of cue consistency and proactivity, we advance an interaction perspective to explain how environmentally specific transformational leadership (ESTL) as guidance and green human resource management (GHRM) as normative practices interact to arouse employee PEB and how three fine-grained proactive psychological states of green self-efficacy, environmental self-accountability, and environmental passion transmit these effects. Two lab experiments constructively offered causal support for our main hypotheses, and a multilevel, multiphase, and multisource field study verified our integrative model and enhanced the generalizability of conclusions. Results indicated that in addition to the direct positive effects, organization-level GHRM, and individual-level ESTL also showed a synergy effect in predicting employee PEB. Three differentiated proactive psychological states positively linked the underlying processes, especially in the high-GHRM context. The findings highlight a multilevel antecedent framework of employee PEB and provide a useful attempt to answer the lingering debate about interactions between leadership and human resource management systems.