• Positive green innovation perceptions foster environmental championing. • Leisure crafting explains how work resources fuel proactive green behavior. • Resource gains transfer across work and non-work domains. • Job routinization amplifies the cross-domain resource pathway. • Multi-wave, multi-source data validates the proposed resource-based model. To explain employees’ proactive innovation support, we propose a resource-based framework for individual-level innovation engagement. Drawing on conservation of resources theory (COR), our model posits that employees’ positive perceptions of green innovations drive proactive environmental championing. The framework introduces the COR perspective of cross-domain resource flow, highlighting how workplace innovations stimulate proactive leisure crafting in non-work domains. Our analysis, based on multi-wave, multi-source data from 365 employees and their supervisors, confirms that positive perceptions of green innovations enhance employees’ leisure crafting during non-work hours, which, in turn, promotes environmental championing at work. This cross-domain resource flow is more pronounced when employees’ tasks are routinized, providing the necessary resource surplus to activate resource mobilization and transfer across work and non-work domains. This study offers a new resource-based perspective on employees’ proactive engagement with green innovations and underscores the broad implications of such processes across multiple life domains of employees.
Chen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.