Multiple pathways linking environmental knowledge and awareness to employees’ green behavior

• Date: 05 February 2018
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/CG-08-2016-0168
• Published date: 05 February 2018
• Pages: 81-103
• Author: Ali Safari,Reza Salehzadeh,Razieh Panahi,Samaneh Abolghasemian
• Subject Matter: Strategy,Corporate governance

Multiple pathways linking environmental

knowledge and awareness to employees’

green behavior

Ali Safari, Reza Salehzadeh, Razieh Panahi and Samaneh Abolghasemian

Abstract

Purpose –The purpose of the presentresearch is to investigate the impact of environmentalknowledge

and awarenesson green behavior with respect to behavioral intentions,environmental attitude and green

commitmentas mediator variables.

Design/methodology/approach –The statistical population included the managers of Esfahan

Mobarakeh Steel Company in Iran. In total, 135 questionnaires were distributed among relevant

managers, out of which 120 questionnaires were returned and analyzed using structural equation

modelingmethod.

Findings –The findings of the study showed that environmental knowledge and awareness has a

significant direct effect on managers’ green behavior (

b

= 0.42). Also, environmental knowledge and

awareness has a significant indirect effect on managers’ green behavior through behavioral intentions

(

b

= 0.34), environmentalattitude (

b

= 0.19) and greencommitment (

b

= 0.33).

Originality value –This study is among the first to simultaneously investigat e the multiple pathways

from environmental knowledge and awareness to green behavior. The second contribution of the

present study is considering green behavior of personnel in the iron and steel industry i n a

developing country.

Keywords Behavioral intentions, Green behavior, Environmentalknowledge and awareness,

Green commitment

Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction

There is growing public concern about the environment and related protection issues that

have occurred in recent years (Beckmann et al., 2014;Abdelzaher and Newburry, 2016;

Porter et al.,2016;Tang and Lam, 2017;Sihvonen and Partanen, 2017;Binder and

Blankenberg, 2017). Environmental issues, such as climate changes, ozone depletion,

deforestation, depravation of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity, are among the matters

that have attracted a lot of attention. As the role of businesses in environmental protection

becomes more prominent, companies need to be more responsible toward the

environment; companies should adapt their business activities to include environmental

protection and appropriate management of natural resources (Buysse and Verbeke, 2003;

Sharma, 2014). According to Dyllickand Hockerts (2002), companies ought to maintain and

develop their economic, social and environmental assets for creating sustainable

communities.

In today’s uncertain world, organizations support their employees to be active and thus

enable the organization to progress more effectively (Frese et al.,1997;Lam et al.,2014).

Organizations require personnel who are pioneers and active regardless of their position in

the organizational hierarchy. Particularly, personnel’s trailblazing roles in the field of

Ali Safari is Faculty Member

at the Department of

Management, University of

Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran.

Reza Salehzadeh is Faculty

Member at the Department

of Management, University

of Shahid Ashrafi Esfahani,

Isfahan, Iran.

Razieh Panahi is Master of

Entrepreneurship

Management and

Samaneh Abolghasemian

is Master of

Entrepreneurship

Management at Shahid

Beheshti University,

Tehran, Iran.

Received 12 August 2016

Revised 14 March 2017

19 May 2017

19 June 2017

6 July 2017

Accepted 6 July 2017

DOI 10.1108/CG-08-2016-0168 VOL. 18 NO. 1, 2018, pp. 81-103, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1472-0701 jCORPORATE GOVERNANCE jPAGE 81

environmental protection have attracted many organizations, as being environmentally

compatible is becoming one of the crucial features of corporations in the twenty-first century

(Starik and Marcus, 2000;Norton et al., 2015). An organization’s personnel, who are active

in the field of environmental issues, tend to perform a wide range of green behaviors in the

organization, such as paper recycling, printing on both sides of a sheet of paper and

conservation of resources such as water and electricity (Lee et al., 1995;Siero et al.,1996;

Bissing-Olson et al., 2013).

In addition, ISO 14001, which is the only certifying document in the ISO 14000 series,

provides guidelines to set up an environmental management system (Chan, 2009). The

standard No. 14001 enables the personnel to identify ecological aspects and implement

pollution prevention programs, subsequently. Besides, official proceedings at the

organizational level, such as the successful implementation of ISO 14001 Environmental

Management System, require the participation of employees (Kitazawa and Sarkis, 2000;

Walley and Stubbs, 2000;Boiral, 2007a;Yin and Schmeidler, 2009); without their

participation in green behavior, these actions become symbolic and unreal (Boiral, 2007b;

Christmann and Taylor, 2006). Although the growing number of environmental rules and

pressures from the market has raised managers’ awareness of environmental practices

(Chan et al., 2014), many organizationsand institutes have adopted different environmental

management measures to protect the environment. However, in actual practice, most of

these organizations and institutes mostly focus on management improvement and technical

changes (Brammer et al.,2012), ignoring the promotion and guidance of employees’ green

behavior (EGB) (Lu et al., 2017). As a matter of fact, because employees spend at least

one-third of their daily time in the organization, their daily green behaviors have a great

effect on minimizing the negative impact of workplace activities upon the organization

environment (Lu

¨lfs and Hahn, 2013;Blok et al.,2015;Lu et al.,2017). Employees’

participation in green behavior can be based on non-rewarded and discretionary initiatives

(i.e. organizational citizenship behaviors) or on prescribed procedures and tasks

(Robertson and Barling, 2015).

EGB is one of the preventive behaviors; there are many ways to encourage personnel to

perform such behaviors. One of these methods is to inform employees of their potential

impacts on the environment and prevention of environmental disasters. More preventive

behaviors occur when employees believe that they have the ability to have an impact upon

their environment (Ashford etal., 1998;Parker et al.,2006;Raub and Liao, 2012). In support

of this view, scientists have pointed out that personnel’s beliefs regarding their influencing

behavior are among the key factors in preventive behaviors (Parker et al., 2006;Stajkovic

and Luthans, 1998). Another way is to inform the personnel about the necessity of green

activities. In fact, for ensuring employee participation in voluntary behaviors, companies

need to ascertain the reasons for these kinds of behaviors (Morrison and Phelps, 1999;

Parker et al.,1997;Tangirala and Ramanujam, 2008).

Given the critical importance of EGB, many researchers have studied the relations between

such variables as green commitment, behavioral intentions, environmental attitude,

environmental knowledge and awareness and EGB separately. However, as mentioned by

Norton et al. (2015), although several studies have been conducted in the field of employee

green behavior (Cantor et al.,2012;Lamm et al.,2013;Greaves et al.,2013;Raineri and

Paille

´, 2016;Temminck et al., 2015), additional empirical evidences are needed to be

gathered before we can be sure of theaccuracy of the results. Especially, there is a need to

focus on the mechanisms through which various personal and contextual antecedents

influence employee green behavior. The first contribution of this study is to analyze the

simultaneous impact of environmental knowledge and awareness on green behavior with

respect to the roles of behavioral intentions, environmental attitude and green commitment

as the mediator variables.

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