Corporate environmental responsibility and employees’ pro-environmental behaviors at work: insights from organizational identification and workplace spirituality perspective

Although corporate environmental responsibility (CER) can influence employees’ attitudes and behaviors, little research has been done to explain the effect of different dimensions of CER (e.g. substantive and symbolic CER) on employees’ pro-environmental behaviors at work, and further to explore the underlying mechanism and the boundary condition of this effect. This research built a theoretical model to explain how and when substantive and symbolic CER influences employees’ pro-environmental behaviors. 188 matched supervisor-subordinate dyads were collected from the manufacturing industries in China. The findings revealed that substantive CER has a positive effect on employees’ pro-environmental behaviors. However, symbolic CER has a negative effect on employees’ pro-environmental behaviors. Furthermore, substantive CER also significantly and indirectly affects employees’ pro-environmental behaviors via organizational identification, while symbolic CER has no significantly indirect effect on employees’ pro-environmental behaviors via organizational identification. In addition, employees’ workplace spirituality moderates the effect of CER on their pro-environmental behaviors.