Employee-centered initiatives toward environmental sustainability in organizations have received increasing attention in recent years. Given the foodservice industry’s sizable workforce, employee pro-environmental behavior (PEB) is fundamental to achieving organization’s environmental goals. Research has heavily focused on prescribed PEB. However, in today’s organization, most PEB remains voluntary. Furthermore, previous research in non-organizational contexts has shown that environmental motivation is strong and highly sensitive to the context predictor of PEB. While research on organizations has previously linked environmental motivation to employee PEB, it remains unclear how the work environment facilitates or hinders employees’ voluntary PEB, and thus fails to establish the underlying mechanism linking features of the work context to voluntary PEB. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory and the JD-R model, the purpose of this study is to identify whether environmental motivation (i.e., autonomous and controlled) acts as a mechanism linking relationships between two types of job demands (i.e., challenge and hindrance demands; Crawford et al., 2010) and supervisor autonomous support to the voluntary PEB of employees in foodservice operations. The model is tested on a sample of 247 foodservice industry back-of-the-house employees across the U.S. who provided self-reported data daily over seven workdays. Multilevel structural equation modeling is used to analyze the daily data and account for the within- and between-level variability. Results demonstrate that foodservice employees engage in voluntary PEB via environmental motivation. Particularly, challenge demands are only linked to voluntary PEB through environmental autonomous motivation, but not through controlled motivation, whereas hindrance demands are only linked to voluntary PEB through environmental controlled motivation, but not through environmental autonomous motivation. Supervisor autonomous support is linked to voluntary PEB through both environmental autonomous and controlled motivation. The understanding of the motivational process leading to voluntary PEB can be useful in identifying avenues to develop environmental behavior change in organizations. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Nohema Garcia Castaneda (Mon,) studied this question.