The grassroots of greenwashing: unpacking employee hypocrisy and CSR decoupling

Purpose The practice of a company acting contrary to public corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages, known as “CSR decoupling,” poses considerable challenges to true sustainability. To help reduce decoupling and bridge the research gaps regarding individual and cross-level investigation, the purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents of employee “green” or environmental hypocrisy and its relation to organizational CSR decoupling. Employee green hypocrisy denotes the misalignment between an employee’s pro-environmental discourse and their actual environmental behavior within the organizational context, irrespective of intent. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a government climate change survey in Taiwan and applies the structural equation modeling technique with AMOS 20.0 to analyze the 1,524 valid responses. Findings The results of this study show that whereas organizational immediacy, climate change management self-efficacy and anticipatory advocacy are positively associated with employee green hypocrisy, individual psychological immediacy, climate change knowledge proficiency and participative advocacy are negatively correlated with employee green hypocrisy. Additionally, green hypocrisy is positively associated with organizational CSR decoupling. Originality/value This study contributes to the CSR(-washing), hypocrisy and climate change literature by adopting rarely seen employee- and multi-level approaches.