For the self or the environment? Customer mistreatment and pro-environmental behavior

Despite a wide investigation on the antecedents of pro-environmental behavior (PEB), factors in employee–customer interactions are poorly understood. This research, drawing from self-concept theory, theorizes that customer mistreatment impairs employees’ state self-concept (i.e., work meaningfulness), which results in decreased PEB. Moreover, employees’ trait self-concepts, i.e., self-orientation and environment-orientation, moderate the main effects. In particular, employees’ self-orientation strengthens customer mistreatment’s negative effect on work meaningfulness and subsequent PEB, while their environment-orientation protects such an effect and even reduces the negative effects of self-orientation. All our hypotheses were confirmed across a ten-day consecutive daily diary research and an experiment. This research not only enriches the antecedents and underlying mechanisms of PEB but also provides effective guidance for fostering employees’ PEB.