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Employee green behavior is a key contributor to corporate greening. While organizations often focus on technical solutions, the role of employees in corporate greening activities is underestimated. Researchers have pointed at different individual as well as organizational factors’ impacts on corporate greening and employee green behavior. However, the multilevel nature of employee green behavior has often been neglected, as have the contextual factors around it. This doctoral dissertation addresses this gap in three papers applying qualitative and quantitative methods to study how employee green behavior is influenced by sustainability paradoxes and the paradoxical tensions they cause for employees and organizations. The first paper examines how sustainability paradoxes influence corporate greening. Activities directed at corporate greening render sustainability paradoxes salient; these are (not) worked through by organizational members in different ways, and have unintended consequences on the effectiveness of corporate greening measures. The second paper explores green employees’ paradoxical identity and performing tensions that arise when employees attempt to engage in green behaviors. It shows that paradoxical tensions can lead to responses of splitting, withdrawal, or, in the most severe cases, pursuing exit strategies. Finally, the third paper studies the conjoint effect of environmental self-identity, perceived supervisory support toward the environment, and perceived organizational support toward the environment on predicting employee green behavior. It shows that a stronger environmental self-identity and higher levels of supervisory support strengthen the effect of organizational support on employee green behavior. However, if environmental self-identity is weak and perceived supervisory support toward the environment is low, organizational support is found to be not related to employee green behavior. These results have implications for the management of, (ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 2022

This study draws on deontic justice theory to examine an unexplored socioemotional micro-foundation of corporate social responsibility (CSR), namely anticipated guilt, in an effort to improve our understanding of employees’ moral reactions to their organization’s CSR. We empirically investigate whether environmental CSR induces anticipated guilt (i.e., concerns about future guilt for not contributing to organizational CSR) leading to organizational environmental citizenship behavior. We also consider two boundary conditions related to the social nature of anticipated guilt: line manager support for the environment and negative environmental group norms. To test our hypotheses, we analyzed data from a convenience sample of 503 managers working in Mexican organizations, using Latent Moderated Structural equation modeling. Overall, our results support the deontic argument that employees care about CSR because CSR embodies moral concerns. Specifically, our findings show that efforts to avoid a guilty conscience increase when the line manager provides increased resources and control to act for the environment, and when group members do not care for the environment, suggesting that employees feel they have to compensate for their group’s moral failure.

While the body of literature on employees’ reactions to their employer's corporate social responsibility (CSR) has grown rapidly over the last decade, little is known regarding employees’ reactions to corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR). Applying deonance theory, we conceptualize CSiR as a moral judgment that a specific action of the organization is intentional, violates a moral standard, and causes harm. Using a multimethod, multisample design (two experiments and one field study), we provide evidence that moral emotions—specifically anger, sympathy, and, to some extent, guilt—are important mechanisms explaining employees’ reactions to CSiR toward other stakeholders, which can take the form of punishing, as often discussed in organization-centric research, as well as the form of compensating the victim of the CSiR, a behavior rarely studied in the management literature. Regarding the role of pride, a well-studied emotion in the micro-CSR literature, in explaining employees’ responses to CSiR, we obtain mixed results. In addition to contributing to the micro-CSR field, we contribute to deonance theory by extending its scope to sympathy and guilt and to the literature on CSiR by offering a conceptualization and a measure of CSiR grounded in deonance theory.

While the body of literature on employees’ reactions to their employer’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) has grown rapidly over the last decade, little is known regarding employees’ reactions to corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR). Applying deonance theory, we conceptualize CSiR as a moral judgment that a specific action of the organization is intentional, violates a moral standard, and causes harm. Using a multimethod, multisample design (two experiments and one field study), we provide evidence that moral emotions—specifically anger, sympathy, and, to some extent, guilt—are important mechanisms explaining employees’ reactions to CSiR toward other stakeholders, which can take the form of punishing, as often discussed in organization-centric research, as well as the form of compensating the victim of the CSiR, a behavior rarely studied in the management literature. Regarding the role of pride, a well-studied emotion in the micro-CSR literature, in explaining employees’ responses to CSiR, we obtain mixed results. In addition to contributing to the micro-CSR field, we contribute to deonance theory by extending its scope to sympathy and guilt and to the literature on CSiR by offering a conceptualization and a measure of CSiR grounded in deonance theory.

While the body of literature on employees’ reactions to their employer’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) has grown fast over the last decade, we know little about employees’ reactions to corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR). Yet, employees are unlikely to respond to irresponsibility as they do to low CSR because CSiR is a specific action, rather than a set of policies and practices, that involves the intentional violation of a moral standard, while low CSR does not. Building on the literature about people’s reactions to moral transgressions and using a multimethod, multisample design (two experiments and one field study), we provide evidence that other-condemning and other-suffering moral emotions are important mechanisms explaining employees’ response to CSiR towards other stakeholders, which can take the form of punishing, as often discussed in the organization-centric research, but also of compensating the victim of the CSiR, a behavior rarely studied in the management literature. We also show that CSR towards other stakeholders and gratitude towards the organization weaken the relationships between CSiR and employees’ responses, providing an explanation for why employees seem to often fail to react to CSiR.

We know little about stakeholders’ reactions to corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR). Yet, CSiR is not simply the other side of the much-studied CSR: stakeholders are unlikely to respond to irresponsibility as they do to low CSR because CSiR involves the intentional violation of a moral standard while low CSR does not. Building on the literature about people’s reactions to moral transgressions, we plan to research other-condemning and other-suffering moral emotions as mechanisms explaining stakeholders’ reactions and to study not only the punitive reactions one expects based on recent work in stakeholder theory, but also compensating the victim, which is new to stakeholder theory. We also introduce moderators specific to the firm context to help explain why stakeholders so often fail to respond to CSiR.