Greening Organizations: The Roles of Leadership and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors

Abstract

Climate change is a serious global issue that poses one of the greatest challenges facing human kind (Kazdin, 2009; Stern, 2011; Swim et al., 2011). Given that organizations are often cited as the largest contributors to climate change (Trudeau and Canada West Foundation, 2007), research needs to investigate how organizations can positively affect climate change. Accordingly, the purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how organizations can positively affect climate change through workplace pro-environmental behaviors. To this end, three studies were conducted. The first study investigated the influence of leaders’ environmentally-specific transformational leadership and their own workplace pro-environmental behaviors on employees’ workplace pro-environmental behaviors. The second study examined if environmentally-specific and general transformational leadership are empirically distinct but related, whether environmentally-specific transformational leadership evokes higher levels of workplace pro-environmental behaviors than general transformational leadership, and if so, examined through mediation why this is the case. The third and final study conceptualizes and defines workplace pro-environmental behaviors as a form of organizational citizenship behaviors that are targeted at benefiting the natural environment (OCBE), and subsequently, developed and refined a measure of OCBE and assessed the measure’s psychometric validity. This dissertation concludes with a general discussion and highlights areas for future research.