Adaptation and Validation of an Employee-Referent Perceived Greenwashing Scale: Evidence from Turkish Hospitality Employees

Employee perceptions of greenwashing capture judgments about inconsistencies between an employer’s environmental claims and its practices, complementing the largely consumer-focused measurement literature. This study adapted Chen and Chang’s five-item perceived greenwashing measure to an employee-referent Turkish hospitality context and examined its initial psychometric properties. Following translation, expert review, cognitive interviews, and a separate pilot (N = 60), 683 employees from 19 establishments completed the main survey. The main survey was randomly divided into non-overlapping exploratory (n = 341) and confirmatory (n = 342) subsamples from the same recruitment period. Parallel analysis supported one factor, and the confirmatory model showed good fit (χ2(5) = 3.97, CFI = 1.000, RMSEA = 0.000, SRMR = 0.011). Composite reliability was 0.876 and average variance extracted was 0.586 in the confirmatory subsample. A multi-construct measurement model differentiated perceived greenwashing from organizational cynicism and green satisfaction. In the full sample, perceived greenwashing was positively associated with cynicism (r = 0.653) and negatively associated with green satisfaction (r = −0.602), providing initial nomological evidence. These findings support the cautious use of this adapted measure in comparable Turkish hospitality samples; generalizability beyond this sampling frame and potential common-method bias require further investigation.