The Effect of Corporate Social Responsibility Characteristics on Employee Green Behavior: A Moral Emotions Perspective

Abstract

Shaping green employees is a source of sustainable competitive advantage for enterprises. However, previous studies have lacked consideration of the moral aspects of employee green behavior (EGB), thus ignoring the mechanism of employee moral psychology, especially the important impact of moral emotions on EGB. Based on the affective events theory, we built a moderated mediation model to test how corporate social responsibility characteristics (CSRCs) affect EGB and to explore the role of organizational pride (OP) and the environmental passion climate (EPC) in this process. SPSS25.0 and Mplus8.0 were used to analyze data from 267 valid questionnaires. The results show that CSRCs’ positive effect required EGB and OP to play a mediating role in the relationship between them. In addition, EPC had a negative moderating effect on the effect of OP on required EGB. These results expand the theoretical territory of EGB from the perspective of moral emotions. In practice, the results provide a moral motivation for cultivating employees’ ecological literacy and stimulating EGB as well as management strategies for organizational environmental protection practice and green sustainable development.

Keywords

• employee green behavior
• corporate social responsibility characteristics
• moral emotion
• organizational pride
• environmental passion climate