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Greening Organizations Through Leaders' Influence on Employees' Pro-Environmental Behaviors

Journal of Organizational Behavior

February 2013
34(2)

DOI:10.1002/job.1820

Authors:

Jennifer L. Robertson

Western University

Julian Barling

Queen's University

Climate change is a serious global issue that poses many risks to environmental and human systems. Although human activity is cited as the main cause of climate change and organizations significantly contribute to climate change, research that investigates workplace pro‐environmental behaviors remains scarce. We develop and test a model that links environmentally‐specific transformational leadership and leaders' workplace pro‐environmental behaviors to employees' pro‐environmental passion and behaviors. Structural equation modeling on data from 139 subordinate–leader dyads (M ages = 37.42 and 40.17 years, respectively) showed that leaders' environmental descriptive norms predicted their environmentally‐specific transformational leadership and their workplace pro‐environmental behaviors, both of which predicted employees' harmonious environmental passion. In turn, employees' own harmonious environmental passion and their leaders' workplace pro‐environmental behaviors predicted their workplace pro‐environmental behaviors. These findings show that leaders' environmental descriptive norms and the leadership and pro‐environmental behaviors they enact play an important role in the greening of organizations. Conceptual and practical implications are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

. Fit indices for the three models.

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Greening organizations through leaders’inﬂuence

on employees’pro-environmental behaviors

JENNIFER L. ROBERTSON*AND JULIAN BARLING

School of Business, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Summary Climate change is a serious global issue that poses many risks to environmental and human systems. Although

human activity is cited as the main cause of climate change and organizations signiﬁcantly contribute to climate

change, research that investigates workplace pro-environmental behaviors remains scarce. We develop and test a

model that links environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and leaders’workplace pro-environmental

behaviorstoemployees’pro-environmental passion and behaviors. Structural equation modeling on data from

139 subordinate–leader dyads (Mages =37.42 and 40.17 years, respectively) showed that leaders’environmental

descriptive norms predicted their environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and their workplace

pro-environmental behaviors, both of which predicted employees’harmonious environmental passion. In turn,

employees’own harmonious environmental passion and their leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors

predicted their workplace pro-environmental behaviors. These ﬁndings show that leaders’environmental descriptive

norms and the leadership and pro-environmental behaviors they enact play an important role in the greening of

Keywords: environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership; green leadership; environmental

sustainability; employee pro-environmental behavior

Climate change is a serious global issue that poses an urgent and perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing

human kind (Kazdin, 2009; Stern, 2011; Swim et al., 2011). Although climate change can be caused by either

natural variation or human activity, scientists conclude that the cause of climate change is largely anthropogenic

(National Research Council, 2010; Swim et al., 2011). Furthermore, organizations are also regarded to be among

the most signiﬁcant contributors to climate change (Trudeau & Canada West Foundation, 2007); and in response,

many have begun to adopt formal and informal environmental management systems (Darnall, Henriques, &

Sadorsky, 2008). However, merely adopting these systems is insufﬁcient. Given that climate change is largely driven

by human activity, and the success of environmental programs often depends on employees’behaviors (Daily, Bishop

& Govindarajulu, 2009), fostering employees’pro-environmental behavior within organizations is now critical.

Encouraging workplace pro-environmental behaviors, such as recycling, conservation, and waste reduction behaviors,

will not only contribute to the greening of organizations but will also positively affect climate change and prevent

further environmental degradation.

The need for human behavioral modiﬁcation toward more pro-environmental behaviors is well recognized by

researchers, who point to the need for empirical research that investigates how promoting workplace pro-environmental

behaviors can be achieved. Recently, there have been several attempts to address this. First, calls have gone out for

psychologists, including those studying organizations, to become more involved in research that encourages

environmentally sustainable behaviors (e.g., Kazdin’s, 2009 APA Presidential Address). Second, the Society for

Industrial and Organizational Psychology devoted one of its theme tracks during its 2009 annual meeting to

corporate social responsibility (e.g., events focused on organizations’and organizational psychologists’responsibility

*Correspondence to: Jennifer L. Robertson, School of Business, Queen’s University, 143 Union St., Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6. E-mail:

jrobertson@business.queensu.ca

Special Issue Article

Received 27 May 2011

Revised 23 May 2012, Accepted 23 June 2012

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 34, 176–194 (2013)

Published online 27 July 2012 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.1820

to the environment). Third, the Academy of Management chose “Green Management Matters”as its conference theme for

2010. Despite these initiatives, there remains a dearth of research related to organizations and environmental

sustainability (Huffman, Watrous-Rodriguez, Henning, & Berry, 2009; Jackson & Seo, 2010). More speciﬁcally,

although there is a body of research that focuses on organizationally relevant environmental issues, such research takes

place primarily at the macro level, where the organization is the unit of analysis. Organizational behavior (OB) research

that investigates employees’workplace pro-environmental behaviors remains scarce (Russell & Grifﬁths, 2008;

Sharma, 2002). We begin to ﬁll this gap in research and respond to recent calls for organizational researchers

to focus on fostering pro-environmental behaviors within organizations by developing and testing a model that

suggests that organizational greening activity can be achieved through leaders’inﬂuence on employees’workplace

pro-environmental behaviors.

Organizational leaders inﬂuence a range of traditional organizational outcomes, such as employee attitudes,

employee commitment, and organizational and ﬁnancial performance (Barling, Christie, & Hoption, 2010), as well

as diverse outcomes such as safety performance (e.g., Barling, Loughlin, & Kelloway, 2002) and environmental

performance (e.g., Ramus & Steger, 2000). Accordingly, the model we develop and test is based on the argument

that the greening of organizations can be enhanced through the inﬂuence of leaders’environmental descriptive

norms, their environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership, and their workplace pro-environmental behav-

iors. Speciﬁcally, we develop and test a model in which (i) leaders’environmental descriptive norms predict their

environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and their workplace pro-environmental behaviors, which in

turn (ii) predict employees’harmonious environmental passion; and (iii) employees’harmonious environmental

passion and leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors predict employees’pro-environmental behaviors

(Figure 1). Within this model, we follow Russell and Grifﬁths (2008) in adopting Ramus and Steger’s (2000)

deﬁnition of workplace pro-environmental behaviors as “any action taken by employees that she or he thought

would improve the environmental performance of the company”(p. 606). Additionally, we deﬁne environmentally-

speciﬁc transformational leadership as a manifestation of transformational leadership in which the content of the

leadership behaviors are all focused on encouraging pro-environmental initiatives.

Environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership

In the last 20 years, transformational leadership has become the most widely studied of all leadership theories and

has been shown to inﬂuence diverse behaviors (Barling et al., 2010; Judge & Piccolo, 2004). Transformational

Leaders’

environmental

descriptive

norms

Environmentally-

specific

transformational

leadership

Leaders’

environmental

behaviors

Employees’

harmonious

environmental

passion

Employees’

environmental

behaviors

Figure 1. Proposed model

GREEN LEADERSHIP AND EMPLOYEES’BEHAVIORS 177

DOI: 10.1002/job

leadership includes four behaviors: idealized inﬂuence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and

individualized consideration (Bass, 1998; Bass & Riggio, 2006), each of which can be applied to inﬂuencing

environmental sustainability within organizations. Idealized inﬂuence centers on leaders becoming role models by

doing what is right rather than what is expedient. Leaders inﬂuence employees through their moral commitment to

their followers and the collective good. In manifesting idealized inﬂuence, leaders are guided by a moral commitment

to an environmentally sustainable planet (the collective good) and choose to do what is right by encouraging actions

that will beneﬁt the natural environment. In doing so, environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leaders serve as role

models for subordinates, who then become more likely to engage in these behaviors themselves. Leaders high in

inspirational motivation stimulate their employees to go beyond their individual needs for the collective good;

they inspire subordinates through their own passion and optimism to overcome psychological setbacks and external

obstacles, and to go beyond what is good for themselves by engaging in behaviors that beneﬁt the natural environment.

Intellectually stimulating leaders encourage employees to think for themselves, question long-held assumptions, and

approach problems in innovative ways. Within the context of inﬂuencing environmental sustainability, leaders high

in intellectual stimulation encourage subordinates to think about environmental issues for themselves, question

long-held assumptions about their own and their organization’s environmental practices, and address environmental

problems in an innovative manner. Finally, leaders who exhibit individualized consideration display compassion

and empathy for employees’well-being and help employees develop their potentials and skills. In doing so, leaders

establish close relationships with followers within which they can transmit their environmental values, model their

environmental behaviors, and raise questions about environmental assumptions and priorities. In short, through

environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership, leaders use their relationship with subordinates to intention-

ally inﬂuence and encourage their subordinates to engage in workplace pro-environmental behaviors.

We conceptualize environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership as a unidimensional construct comprising

the four components for several reasons. First, consistently high correlations are yielded between the four components,

thereby supporting the combination of all four components (e.g., Barling et al., 2010; Bycio, Hackett, & Allen, 1995).

Second, recently developed measures of transformational leadership in organizations (e.g., Herold, Fedor, & Caldwell,

2008; Rubin, Munz, & Bommer, 2005) and classroom settings (e.g., Beauchamp et al., 2010) use unidimensional

scales. Third, an exploratory factor analysis on safety-speciﬁc transformational leadership vindicated the use of

a unidimensional index of the construct (Barling et al., 2002). For these reasons, a unidimensional approach to

environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership is justiﬁed.

The model we develop goes beyond specifying a direct relationship between environmentally-speciﬁc transformational

leadership and subordinates’workplace pro-environmental behaviors in several ways, all of which extend our

understanding of how leaders inﬂuence employees’workplace pro-environmental behaviors. Speciﬁcally, environmental

descriptivenormsareidentiﬁed as a predictor of environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and leaders’

workplace pro-environmental behaviors. Further, the effects of leaders’behavioral modeling are considered together

with environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership, and any effects of environmentally-speciﬁc transforma-

tional leadership are held to be indirect. We will now discuss each of the links in the model (Figure 1).

Leaders’environmental descriptive norms, leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors,

and environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership

Descriptive norms refer to people’s perceptions of what most others do (Cialdini, 2007), and these perceptions can

motivate behavior by conveying important social information about effective and adaptable behavior (Cialdini,

2007; Goldstein, Cialdini, & Griskevisius, 2008). When individuals follow the lead of others, they speed up the

decision-making process such that time and cognitive effort are saved, while appropriate behavior likely results

(Goldstein, Griskevicius, & Cialdini, 2007). In the environmental context, environmental descriptive norms

provide information that pro-environmental behaviors are effective and adaptable in the given context, and they

have been shown to have powerful effects on pro-environmental behavior. For example, in a study of hotel

178 J. L. ROBERTSON AND J. BARLING

DOI: 10.1002/job

patrons, messages containing a descriptive norm (e.g., “join your fellow guests in helping to save the environment”)

had a signiﬁcantly greater effect on towel reuse (i.e., conservation behaviors) than messages containing pleas to protect

the environment (Goldstein et al., 2008). Although descriptive norms can motivate pro-environmental behaviors, they

can be more effective when they reference the behaviors of similar others. For example, Goldstein et al. (2008)

demonstrated that messages describing situational similarities among individuals (e.g., others who also stayed in the

same hotel room had reused their towels) resulted in higher rates of towel reuse among hotel patrons than messages

that described less situational similarities among individuals (e.g., hotel guests in general reused their towels). Drawing

on Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory, Goldstein et al. (2007) explain that individuals adhere to descriptive

norms when they reference similar others because individuals tend to follow the norms of similar others when deciding

how to behave.

Following this research, we propose that environmental descriptive norms will inﬂuence leaders when they

reference friends, family, and colleagues (similar others), such that leaders’perceptions that similar others’engage

in pro-environmental behaviors will directly inﬂuence their own workplace pro-environmental behaviors. For the

same reasons, leaders’environmental descriptive norms will inﬂuence the behaviors they choose to emphasize and

encourage among their subordinates when in leadership positions, and therefore, will affect their own environmentally-

speciﬁc transformational leadership. Accordingly, we hypothesize that

Hypothesis 1a: Leaders’environmental descriptive norms will inﬂuence their workplace pro-environmental

behaviors.

Hypothesis 1b: Leaders’environmental descriptive norms will inﬂuence their environmentally-speciﬁc transfor-

mational leadership.

Environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and leaders’workplace pro-environmental

behaviors

Leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and their own workplace pro-environmental behaviors

both fulﬁll signiﬁcant roles in understanding employees’workplace pro-environmental behaviors. Specifying

the relationship between the two leadership variables, however, is complicated by the absence of prior research.

Thus, we cannot favor either of the two possible unidirectional effects (i.e., leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc

transformational leadership predicts their pro-environmental behaviors, or that their pro-environmental behaviors

predict their environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership). However, given that ipsative behavioral

consistency (i.e., behavioral consistency across situations, within individuals; Sherman, Nave, & Funder,

2010) becomes more likely as situations become more similar, and both leader behaviors we are studying

are enacted in the same situation (i.e., in the context of an organization where a leader is inﬂuencing a follower), our

proposed model acknowledges that there will be a signiﬁcant correlation between leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc

transformational leadership and their own pro-environmental behaviors. Accordingly, we hypothesize that

Hypothesis 2: Environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and leaders’workplace pro-environmental

behaviors will be positively correlated.

Environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and subordinates’harmonious

environmental passion

Any effects of transformational leadership on individual behaviors are invariably indirect (e.g., Barling et al., 2010),

and we accord a similar indirect role to environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership by predicting that

GREEN LEADERSHIP AND EMPLOYEES’BEHAVIORS 179

DOI: 10.1002/job

its inﬂuence on employees’workplace pro-environmental behaviors will be mediated by employees’harmonious

passion for the environment. Harmonious passion reﬂects a positive emotion that remains under the individual’s

control and results in motivation to engage in the activity or relationship that is the target of the passion (Vallerand

et al., 2007). For the purpose of our study, we deﬁne harmonious environmental passion as a positive emotion

that results in an individual wanting to engage in pro-environmental behaviors. Thus, together with prior

research that suggests (i) that leaders evoke emotions in followers (Dasborough & Ashkanasy, 2002) and

(ii) that transformational leadership behaviors can spark employee passion (Cardon, 2008), we suggest that

each of the four transformational leadership behaviors is especially suited to evoking employees’harmonious

passion for environmental sustainability.

First, through the moral commitment to the environment that is characteristic of idealized inﬂuence, environmentally-

speciﬁc transformational leaders will likely elicit employees’harmonious passion for the environment. Similarly,

enunciating a vision in which environmental sustainability is paramount signals what is most important in the

workplace and to the leader. Employees are more likely to be passionate about something of organizational and

social importance. Second, by encouraging employees to go beyond their own needs for the collective good, and

inspiring them to achieve more than they thought they could, leaders who manifest inspirational motivation will

engage employees’harmonious environmental passion. Speciﬁcally, inspirational motivation will create optimism

about one’s personal contribution to the organization’s environmental sustainability and thus ignite employees’

passion. Third, consistent with intellectual stimulation, encouraging employees to think about the environment

in new and optimistic ways, and thinking about the effects one’s own behavior can have on the environment, will

engage followers’harmonious passion for this issue. Fourth, the interpersonal behaviors consistent with individualized

consideration (e.g., caring, mentoring) create an interpersonal relationship in which employees are more amenable to

leaders’inﬂuence about environmental issues. Thus,

Hypothesis 3: Environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership will inﬂuence subordinates’harmonious

passion for the environment.

Leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors, subordinates’workplace pro-environmental

behaviors, and harmonious environmental passion

One of the sturdiest ﬁndings in the social psychological literature is that individuals learn by observing others’

behaviors and subsequently, initiate and sustain similar patterns of behavior themselves (Bandura, 1977).

While initial research focused mainly on learned aggression, Bandura (1986) subsequently noted that just

about anything can be learned by observing others’behaviors. Research now shows that organizations’cultures

can be transmitted to employees through modeling by leaders (Schein, 1995) and that role models inﬂuence ethical

conduct and pro-social behavior (Brown, Trevino, & Harrison, 2005; Bryan & Test, 1967). Following this

research, we suggest that leaders can also inﬂuence subordinates’workplace pro-environmental behaviors via

modeling.

Organizational leaders are ideally placed to serve as role models because of their position, status, and power

(Brown et al., 2005). By displaying a consistent pattern of pro-environmental behaviors, leaders signal to

employees that such behaviors are valued and expected in the workplace. In doing so, subordinates learn that

enacting such a behavior will lead to desirable consequences and therefore will be motivated to engage in

these same behaviors themselves. Unlike environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership, leaders engage in

workplace pro-environmental behaviors to be consistent with their values rather than through any intention to inﬂuence

others. In turn, when employees watch their leaders engage in workplace pro-environmental behaviors, they learn (i)

that such behaviors are valued, expected, and rewarded; and (ii) how they can engage in similar behaviors. Thus, we

hypothesize that

180 J. L. ROBERTSON AND J. BARLING

DOI: 10.1002/job

Hypothesis 4a: Leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors will inﬂuence subordinates’workplace pro-

environmental behaviors.

In addition, emotional contagion occurs among subordinates when they watch their leaders passionately engage

in workplace pro-environmental behaviors. Emotional contagion refers to the automatic and unconscious process

by which individuals harmonize and imitate facial expressions, vocalizations, and movements of others, thereby

resulting in the transfer of emotions between individuals (Hatﬁeld, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994). Research in

both laboratory and ﬁeld settings demonstrate that emotional contagion occurs between leaders and followers

(e.g., Cherulnik, Donley, Wiewel, & Miller, 2001; Johnson, 2008; Lewis, 2000; Sy, Cote, & Saavedra, 2005)

and is an important leadership process (Johnson, 2008). Consistent with this research and the emotional nature of

passion (Cardon, Wincent, Singh, & Drnovesk, 2009), we propose that subordinates will synchronize and imitate

the expressions, vocalizations, and movements their leaders emit when passionately engaging in pro-environmental

behaviors. In turn, this will result in emotional contagion and, consequently, ignite employees’harmonious passion

for the environment.

Hypothesis 4b: Leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors will inﬂuence subordinates’harmonious passion

for the environment.

Subordinates’harmonious environmental passion and workplace pro-environmental behaviors

Finally, we predict that employees’harmonious environmental passion will lead to workplace pro-environmental

behaviors for several reasons. First, experiencing harmonious passion is energizing, leaves individuals inspired to make

a difference (Cardon et al., 2009; Vallerand et al., 2003), and results in a motivation to engage in the activity that is the

object of the passion (Vallerand et al., 2007). In the context of harmonious environmental passion, this would include

engaging in behaviors that should improve the environment. Second, positive emotions (e.g., happiness and joy)

inﬂuence workplace pro-environmental behaviors (e.g., Fineman, 1996; Russell, 2010), and harmonious environmental

passion is a positive emotion. Third, indirect support for the role of environmental harmonious passion as a mediator

derives from a recent study showing that harmonious passion can indeed play a mediating role (e.g., Dong, Chen, &

Yao, 2011). Thus, we hypothesize that

Hypothesis 5: Subordinates’harmonious environmental passion will inﬂuence their workplace pro-environmental

behaviors.

Current study

Taken together, the present study addresses two major research questions: (i) Do leaders’environmentally-

speciﬁc transformational leadership and workplace pro-environmental behaviors inﬂuence employees’workplace

pro-environmental behaviors? and (ii) What variables predict environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership

and leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors? To investigate these research questions, and to shed light

on the role of leaders in the greening of organizations, we developed and tested a model that stipulates (i)

environmental descriptive norms predict leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and their

workplace pro-environmental behaviors, both of which predict employees’harmonious environmental passion; and that

(ii) employees’workplace pro-environmental behaviors are predicted by their own harmonious environmental passion

and their leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors (Figure 1). In testing this model, we used multi-source data to

exclude any threats from mono-method bias.

GREEN LEADERSHIP AND EMPLOYEES’BEHAVIORS 181

DOI: 10.1002/job

Method

Proposed model

Sample recruitment and participants. To test our model, we analyzed leader–follower dyads (e.g., Hirst, Van Dick,

& Van Knippenberg, 2009; Wang & Cheng, 2010). Participants consisted of both leaders and their subordinates in

the U.S. and Canada and were recruited through StudyResponse (The StudyResponse Project, 2004). Participation

required that panelists were (i) either employees or in a leadership position, (ii) willing to invite their leader/

subordinate to participate (depending on which role they ﬁlled), and (iii) interacted with each other at least once

per week. Existing panelists were only asked for a single match, so one supervisor selected and invited one subordinate

(or vice versa). StudyResponse recruited 231 dyads, from which 188 pairs completed the surveys. However, after

eliminating dyads because of missing data, we retained 139 pairs for analysis, yielding an effective response rate of

60.17 percent. Because of the number of dyads for which one partner’s data was not available, we assessed whether

there were signiﬁcant differences in the gender, age, or educational level for either the leaders or the subordinates in

terms of the dyads retained for analyses versus those who were dropped; no signiﬁcant differences emerged in any of

these analyses, p>.05.

The average age of the 139 leaders (61.6 percent men) was 40.17 years, and the average age of the 139 subordinates

(52.5 percent men) was 37.42 years. Descriptive data and reliability for all study variables appear in Table 1.

Measures

Because of a lack of existing measures, we created scales speciﬁcally for this study to measure environmental

descriptive norms, harmonious environmental passion, and workplace pro-environmental behaviors. To help develop

and reﬁne our measures, we used a convenience sample of six volunteer doctoral students in OB, all of whom were

familiar with the conceptualization and application of descriptive norms, harmonious passion, and environmental

behaviors to the organizational context. We provided the graduate students with a deﬁnition of the construct of interest

and a list of items we generated to measure this construct. Students then reviewed the items to ensure that they were

clear, concise, and reﬂected the deﬁnition of the construct. Items were deleted if the majority of volunteer graduate

students and the authors collectively agreed that an item was hard to understand (i.e., not clear and concise) and/or

did not reﬂect the construct’sdeﬁnition. We undertook this process to provide some evidence for the understandability

and face validity of our measures.

Table 1. Descriptive statistics, intercorrelations, and reliabilities for all study variables (N= 139).

MSD 1 2 345678

1. Employee age 37.42 9.58

2. Leader age 40.17 10.73 .53**

3. Leader descriptive norms 0.67 0.32 .13 .06 .77

4. Leader ratings: ETFL 2.36 1.06 .22** .28** .36** .95

5. Employee ratings: ETFL 2.03 1.15 .12 .30** .36** .70** .96

6. Leader environmental behavior 3.43 1.04 .01 .18* .42** .62** .51** .86

7. Employee environmental behavior 3.49 1.15 .11 .12 .41** .49** .53** .64** .88

8. Employee environmental passion 3.73 0.98 .05 .16 .32** .51** .53** .51** .82** .96

Reliability of leaders’descriptive norms is based on the Kuder–Richardson (KR20) because the scaling is dichotomous, not continuous. ETFL

refers to environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership.

*p<.05; **p<.01.

182 J. L. ROBERTSON AND J. BARLING

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Leaders’environmental descriptive norms

We constructed eight questions to measure leaders’environmental descriptive norms. Upon reviewing these items

with the graduate students, we deleted three items that asked if respondents talked about environmental issues with

children, extended family, friends, and/or coworkers because we determined that talking about environmental

issues does not reﬂect perceptions that others engage in pro-environmental initiatives (i.e., the deﬁnition of

environmental descriptive norms). The ﬁve remaining questions asked whether participants’family,friends,or

coworkers practice pro-environmental behaviors, endorse environmental programs, or work for environmental

organizations. Sample questions include “Do your family members and/or friends endorse environmentally

friendly programs”and “Do your co-workers practice environmentally friendly behaviors that you know about

or have seen”; leaders responded with “yes,”or “no.”

Environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership

In an attempt to increase response rates by keeping the survey short, we used selected items (e.g., Barling et al.,

2002; Jung & Avolio, 2000) from the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Avolio & Bass, 1995) to assess

subordinates’perceptions of their leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and leaders’self

perceptions of their environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership. Speciﬁcally, we selected seven items that

reﬂect each of the four behaviors of transformational leadership and that could be modiﬁed to ensure that they were

appropriate for the context of inﬂuencing environmental sustainability. Subordinates and leaders rated how

frequently each item described their leaders’behaviors (0 = not at all,4=frequently if not always). We conducted

separate exploratory factor analyses with varimax rotation on leaders’and subordinates’ratings of environmentally-

speciﬁc transformational leadership, which yielded a single factor accounting for 83.41 and 80.72 percent of the

variance, respectively, justifying the use of a unidimensional scale. Leaders’self-ratings of environmentally-speciﬁc

transformational leadership were correlated with subordinates’corresponding ratings (r=.70, p<.01).

Harmonious passion for the environment

We developed 15 items to measure subordinates’harmonious environmental passion. We again provided volunteer

graduate students with a deﬁnition of the construct and examined these items; as a result of which, we excluded

ﬁve items because they did not reﬂect the construct of interest. Sample items include “I am passionate about

the environment”and “I enjoy engaging in environmentally friendly behaviors,”each rated on a 5-point scale

(1 = strongly disagree,5=strongly agree).

Workplace pro-environmental behaviors

On the basis of Ramus and Steger’s (2000) deﬁnition of workplace pro-environmental behaviors, the “How to

‘Green’your Workplace: a TUC Guide”(TUC Green Workplaces, 2007), and the environmental psychology

literature (e.g., Garling, Fujii, & Garling, 2003; Staats, Harland, & Wilke, 2004), we generated 17 items to assess

environmental behaviors that individuals can engage in while at work. Together with the volunteer graduate

students, we determined that seven items were not clear, concise, and/or did not reﬂect the construct’sdeﬁnition,

and deleted them on this basis. Sample items of those included in the ﬁnal questionnaire are “I print double-sided

whenever possible”and “I turn lights off when not in use.”We deleted three additional items (“I keep my

computer running when I’m not using it”;“I use the elevator rather than the stairs”;and“I drive to work by myself”)

because they reduced the reliability of the scale. Both leaders and subordinates indicated the frequency with

which they engaged in each of the behaviors on a 5-point scale (1 = never,5=always), and we included a “not

applicable”option.

Items developed speciﬁcally for this study (i.e., environmental descriptive norms, harmonious environmental

passion, and workplace pro-environmental behavior scales) appear in Appendix A.

GREEN LEADERSHIP AND EMPLOYEES’BEHAVIORS 183

DOI: 10.1002/job

Measurement model

Because several of the scales were constructed speciﬁcally for this study, we ﬁrst tested a measurement model to

provide some evidence for the validity of the measures.

Sample

We tested the measurement model on a sample of undergraduate students who received course credit for their

participation. We recruited students through a research participant pool at a Canadian business school. To participate,

student volunteers had to have worked full time and report to a supervisor during the previous summer; 225 eligible

undergraduate students completed the study. The minimum age of the student sample was 18 years, and the typical age

of the undergraduate students in the program from which we sampled from ranges from 18 to 23 years.

Measures

The undergraduate students completed the same measures completed by the sample used to test our proposed model.

Eligible students provided data on their perceptions of their leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc transformational

leadership, and their own harmonious environmental passion and workplace pro-environmental behaviors. Given the

student sample, however, we could not obtain leaders’self-reports of environmental descriptive norms or workplace

pro-environmental behaviors. Because we were interested in validating the items used, and not the source, we measured

students’self-reports of their own environmental descriptive norms and workplace pro-environmental behaviors.

Results

Testing the measurement model

Following Bagozzi and Edwards (1998), we ﬁrst computed exploratory factor analyses and formed parcels of two or

three items such that each parcel had approximately the same average factor loadings. We estimated all analyses by

using maximum likelihood estimation as implemented in AMOS 19 (IBM, Armonk, New York, USA) and we based

our analyses on the covariance matrix. Separate conﬁrmatory factor analyses tested a 4-factor model (the predicted

model) and three comparison models: (i) a 3-factor model reﬂecting a behavioral factor (perceptions of leaders’

environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and employees’own workplace pro-environmental behaviors)

and separate factors for employees’harmonious environmental passion and environmental descriptive norms; (ii) a

2-factor model reﬂecting a leadership factor (perceptions of leaders’environmentally-speciﬁctransformational

leadership) and a separate factor for employees’workplace pro-environmental behaviors, harmonious environmental

passion, and environmental descriptive norms; and (iii) a single-factor model with all the items loading on one factor.

The 4-factor model provided a very good absolute ﬁt to the data w

(38, N= 225) = 44.27, ns;w

/df =1.17;CFI =0.99,

NFI = 0.97, parsimonious normed ﬁt index (PNFI) = 0.56; RMSEA = 0.025; test of RMSEA signiﬁcance

(PCLOSE) = 0.92. The three comparison models all provided poor absolute ﬁts to the data (Table 2). In addition,

Table 2. Measurement model.

df w

/df CFI NFI PNFI RMSEA PCLOSE

Four-factor 44.27 38 1.16 0.99 0.97 0.56 0.025 0.92

Three-factor 362.81 41 8.85 0.78 0.76 0.47 0.176 0.00

Two-factor 138.98 43 3.23 0.93 0.91 0.59 0.094 0.00

One-factor 761.00 44 17.30 0.51 0.50 0.34 0.253 0.00

Note: N = 225. PNFI, parsimonious normed ﬁt index; PCLOSE, test of RMSEA signiﬁcance.

184 J. L. ROBERTSON AND J. BARLING

DOI: 10.1002/job

the 4-factor model provided a signiﬁcantly better ﬁt to the data than the 3-factor (Δw

/df = 318.54/3, p<.01),

2-factor (Δw

/df = 94.71/5 p<.01), and 1-factor (Δw

/df = 716.73/6, p<.01) models.

Testing the proposed model

We operationalized the proposed model as a manifest variable path analysis using maximum likelihood estimation

as implemented in AMOS 19. We again based all analyses on the covariance matrix. To avoid threats from mono-method

bias, we obtained data from both leaders and subordinates (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003). Speciﬁcally,

leaders provided data on their own descriptive norms, environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership, and

pro-environmental behaviors; and subordinates rated their leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership,

and their own harmonious passion and workplace pro-environmental behaviors. Leaders’and subordinates’ratings of

environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership were highly correlated (r= .70). Thus, to avoid common-method

bias, we took data for leaders’environmental descriptive norms, environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership,

and leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors from leaders’self-reports, whereas we derived data on subordinates’

harmonious environmental passion and workplace pro-environmental behaviors from followers’self reports.

The proposed model provided a good absolute ﬁt to the data, w

(3, N= 139) = 5.30, ns;CFI = 0.99; NFI = 0.98;

PNFI = 0.20; RMSEA = 0.075; PCLOSE = 0.27 (see Table 3). We show the standardized parameter estimates for

the proposed model in Figure 2. As predicted, subordinates’workplace pro-environmental behaviors were predicted

by their own harmonious environmental passion (b= .66, p<.01) and by leaders’workplace pro-environmental

behaviors (b= .31, p<.01). In turn, subordinates harmonious environmental passion was predicted by leaders’

Table 3. Fit indices for the three models.

Model w

df w

/df CFI NFI PNFI RMSEA PCLOSE

Proposed model 5.30 3 1.77 0.99 0.98 0.20 0.075 0.27

Fully mediated 37.64 4 9.41 0.90 0.89 0.24 0.247 0.00

Alternative partially mediated 56.89 4 14.22 0.84 0.83 0.22 0.310 0.00

Note: N = 139. PNFI, parsimonious normed ﬁt index; PCLOSE, test of RMSEA signiﬁcance.

Leaders’

environmental

descriptive

norms

Environmentally-

specific

transformational

leadership

Leaders’

environmental

behaviors

Employees’

harmonious

environmental

passion

Employees’

environmental

behaviors

.32

.66

.56

.31

.36

.42

R2=.74R2=.32

Figure 2. Results of structural equation modeling

GREEN LEADERSHIP AND EMPLOYEES’BEHAVIORS 185

DOI: 10.1002/job

environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership (b= .32, p<.01) and leaders’workplace pro-environmental

behaviors (b=.31, p<.01). Leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors and environmentally-speciﬁctransfor-

mational leadership were signiﬁcantly related (b= .56, p<.01); and leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc transformational

leadership and their workplace pro-environmental behaviors were predicted by leaders’environmental descriptive norms

(b= .36, p<.01 and b= .42, p<.01, respectively). See Figure 2 for R

values

We compared the goodness of ﬁt of the proposed model with two alternative models, namely a fully mediated

model (which removes the path between leaders’and subordinates’workplace pro-environmental behaviors) and

an alternative partially mediated model (which deletes the correlation between leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc

transformational leadership and leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors). The fully mediated model

provided a poor absolute ﬁt to the data—w

(4, N= 139) = 37.64, p<.01; CFI = 0.90; NFI = 0.89; PNFI = 0.24;

RMSEA = 0.247 PCLOSE = 0.00—as did the alternative partially mediated model—w

(4, N= 139) = 56.89, p<.01;

CFI = 0.84; NFI = 0.83; PNFI = 0.22; RMSEA = 0.310; PCLOSE = 0.00 (see Table 3). In addition, the proposed

model provided a signiﬁcantly better ﬁt to the data than both the fully mediated model, Δw

/df = 32.34/1, p<.01,

and the alternative partially mediated model, Δw

/df = 51.59/1, p<.01.

Discussion

The extent and pace of climate change has increased drastically over the past several decades (National Research

Council, 2010), resulting is a serious global concern that is arguably one of the greatest challenges facing human kind

(Kazdin, 2009; Stern, 2011; Swim et al., 2011). As climate change and its effects are likely irreversible (Solomon,

Plattner, Knutti, & Friedlingstein, 2009), the importance of preventing any further damage cannot be over-emphasized.

Given that climate change is largely caused by human activity (National Research Council, 2010; Swim et al., 2011)

and organizations have been regarded as signiﬁcant contributors to climate change (Trudeau & Canada West

Foundation, 2007), empirical research that investigates how environmentally sustainable behaviors within organizations

can be encouraged is needed. Accordingly, the primary goal of this study was to examine how leaders can affect

organizational greening activity through their inﬂuence on employees’pro-environmental passion and behaviors. To this

end, we developed and tested a model linking leaders’environmental descriptive norms to their environmentally-speciﬁc

transformational leadership and their workplace pro-environmental behaviors, and leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc

transformational leadership and their workplace pro-environmental behaviors to employees’workplace pro-

environmental behaviors. The mediating role of employees’harmonious environmental passion is emphasized

in the model (Figure 2). The data provided strong support for the proposed model, and several of the ﬁndings offer

important contributions to green OB and OB research more broadly.

To begin, our ﬁndings advance our understanding of green leadership in various ways. First, although others have

noted that environmental leaders are most likely to exhibit a transformational leadership style (Egri & Herman,

2000), there is no empirical research investigating the effects of transformational leadership or any other leadership

theory on environmental sustainability within organizations (Barling et al., 2010). Our model demonstrated that when

transformational leadership behaviors are focused on encouraging pro-environmental initiatives, environmentally-

speciﬁc transformational leaders can positively affect employees’pro-environmental passion and behaviors. Second,

although the vast majority of existing research on leadership focuses on its consequences, our research points to some

of the determinants to green leadership. Within the constraints of the cross-sectional data used in the current study,

we identiﬁed leaders’environmental descriptive norms as a potential antecedent of environmentally-speciﬁc

We tested an alternative model that uses subordinates’ratings of their leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership, and found

that when the model is speciﬁed in this alternative way, the model still ﬁts the data, w

(3, N= 139) = 3.75, ns;w

/df = 1.25; CFI = 0.99; NFI = 0.99;

PNFI = 0.20; RMSEA = 0.042; PCLOSE = 0.43.

186 J. L. ROBERTSON AND J. BARLING

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transformational leadership and leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors. Third, unlike research on

transformational leadership, which generally examines its effects in isolation, our research focuses on the

effects of two aspects of green leadership. Speciﬁcally, we investigated the effects of both environmentally-

speciﬁc transformational leadership and leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors. The results showed that

these two variables independently and signiﬁcantly predicted employees’harmonious environmental passion.

Our ﬁndings also uncover some of the determinants of employees’workplace pro-environmental behaviors. Our

ﬁndings point to the indirect role of environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership, suggesting that leaders

indirectly inﬂuence their followers’workplace pro-environmental behaviors when they (i) share their values

(idealized inﬂuence), (ii) convince followers that they can achieve at levels previously considered almost impossible

(inspirational motivation), (iii) help employees think about issues in new and innovative ways (intellectual stimulation),

and (iv) establish a relationship with their employees (individualized consideration) through which they can exert an

inﬂuence on pro-environmental behaviors. Our ﬁndings also point to a modeling inﬂuence on employees’workplace

pro-environmental behaviors that is consistent with social learning theory (Bandura, 1977). As employees see their

leaders voluntarily enact pro-environmental behaviors, they make inferences about their leaders’values, and about

the desirability of different behaviors, and respond accordingly. Finally, expanding on previous research that

suggests that positive emotions inﬂuence workplace pro-environmental behaviors (e.g., Fineman, 1996; Russell,

2010), our results support a direct inﬂuence of employees’harmonious environmental passion on their workplace

pro-environmental behaviors. When employees experience this positive emotion, they become energized,

inspired to make a difference in the quality of the natural environment, and are motivated to engage in

workplace pro-environmental behaviors.

Further, the current study offers several contributions to transformational leadership research by replicating

and expanding knowledge derived from transformational and safety-speciﬁc transformational leadership

studies. First, our study expands on transformational leadership research by taking the nature of the targeted

behaviors into consideration. Focusing on the effects of general transformational leadership on speciﬁc behaviors

(e.g., pro-environmental behaviors) might limit our understanding of the potential effectiveness of target-speciﬁc

transformational leadership in attaining targeted outcomes. The rationale for this is that the expression of the four

components of transformational leadership may differ depending on the types of outcomes targeted. Transformational

leadership that focuses on inﬂuencing speciﬁc behaviors (whether safety or environmentally-speciﬁc) will

provide considerable clariﬁcation to employees as to what leaders value, thereby enhancing employees’role clarity

(Beehr & Glaser, 2005).

Second, although very few studies have focused on transformational leadership that inﬂuence targeted behaviors,

safety has been the focus of inquiry (Barling et al., 2002; Conchie & Donald, 2009; Conchie, Taylor & Donald,

2012; Kelloway, Mullen, & Francis, 2006; Mullen & Kelloway, 2009; Mullen, Kelloway, & Teed, 2011). Our

study extends these studies by expanding the focus of transformational leadership to include environmentally-

speciﬁc transformational leadership. In doing so, we suggest that transformational leadership is a broad construct

that is composed of different, target-speciﬁc sub-dimensions. Similar to organizational climate research that was

initially general in focus and then progressed to focus on a climate “for something”(Schneider, Bowen, Ehrhart, &

Holcombe, 2000), transformational leadership research may move forward by shifting its focus from general to

target-speciﬁc transformational leadership. Consequently, the way in which we study, practice, and teach leadership

may fundamentally change, and a new set of research questions may arise.

Third, our study expands on safety-speciﬁc transformational leadership research by investigating a different

mediator variable (e.g., harmonious environmental passion), exploring the indirect effects of environmentally-

speciﬁc transformational leadership together with direct and indirect effects of other variables (e.g., leaders’work-

place pro-environmental behaviors) on subordinates’workplace pro-environmental behaviors, and by examining

predictors (e.g., environmental descriptive norms) of environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership.

Fourth, our research contributes to the OB literature more broadly in several ways. Our study identiﬁed environmental

descriptive norms as an antecedent of environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and leaders’workplace

pro-environmental behaviors, indicating that what leaders’friends and family do (i.e., descriptive norms) can spill

GREEN LEADERSHIP AND EMPLOYEES’BEHAVIORS 187

DOI: 10.1002/job

over to the organizational context and inﬂuence members’behaviors. Extending this to the broader OB literature

suggests that descriptive norms may play a role as an antecedent to other organizationally relevant variables (e.g., safety

practices, counterproductive workplace behaviors, and other leadership styles), and future research should investigate

descriptive norms as an antecedent. Next, our study established environmental harmonious passion as an important pre-

dictor of workplace pro-environmental behaviors, which raises the question of whether harmonious passion might in-

ﬂuence other organizational behaviors? Future research may beneﬁt by examining the effect of harmonious passion

for equality on leaders’distributional, procedural, and interactional justice behaviors, or the effect of harmonious

passion for helping on organizational citizenship behaviors. Finally, along with other initial research (e.g., Fineman,

1996; Russell, 2010; Russell & Grifﬁths, 2008), our ﬁndings suggest that pro-environmental behaviors are an important

aspect of organizational life, which may affect other organizationally relevant outcomes.For example, previous research

has shown that individuals who engage in general pro-environmental behaviors experience gains in subjective

well-being (e.g., Brown & Kasser, 2005) and self-esteem (Kasser, 2005; Richins & Dawson, 1992). Extending this

to an organizational context suggests that engaging in workplace pro-environmental behaviors may positively

inﬂuence similar organizational outcomes, including job satisfaction and job-related self-esteem, and thereby raises

new questions of general interest to the OB ﬁeld.

Future research

As research focusing on employees’workplace pro-environmental behaviors remains sparse, several areas for future

research are offered. First, in addition to environmental descriptive norms, other variables may predict leaders’

environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and workplace pro-environmental behaviors. For example,

research identiﬁes the importance of role identity salience in predicting prosocial behavior (Charng, Piliavin, &

Callero, 1988; Piliavin, Grube, & Callero, 2002), and researchers have applied a prosocial behavior framework to

analyzing pro-environmental behaviors (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002). Others have suggested that pro-environmental

behaviors can be viewed as a combination of self-interest and prosocial motives (Bamberg & Moser, 2007). Accordingly,

future research should investigate the effects of role identity salience on leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors.

Additionally, Arnocky, Stroink, and DeCicco (2007) suggest that metapersonal self-construal (inclusion of all living

things in the perception of the self; Stroink & DeCicco, 2007) predicts environmental concern and behaviors. Researchers

might investigate metapersonal self-construal as a predictor of environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership.

Second, additional mediators might be uncovered. Studies consistently show that employee attitudes (e.g., trust

in the leader, organizational commitment) mediate the relationship between leadership and employee behaviors

(e.g., Barling et al., 2010), and similar variables might be investigated in future research focusing on leadership and

pro-environmental behaviors. Third, there may be important moderators of the relationships identiﬁed in the

model. For example, both leader and follower age may moderate any effects of environmentally-speciﬁc

transformational leadership and leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors. Speciﬁcally, any effects uncovered

may be stronger for younger leaders and subordinates, as younger individuals tend to be more environmentally oriented,

less committed to the ideals of economic growth, and less concerned about the conﬂict between environmentalism and

economic interests than older people (Jones & Dunlap, 1992; Malkis & Grasmick, 1977).

Fourth, meta-analytic ﬁndings show that organizations’environmental performance predicts their ﬁnancial

performance (Orlitztky, Schmidt, & Rynes, 2003). As such, investigating this and other consequences of leaders’

and subordinates’workplace pro-environmental behaviors for the organization is an important avenue for future

research. Future research should also investigate other variables that might predict subordinates’workplace

pro-environmental behaviors. For example, several studies have pointed to the role of external pressures in

shaping environmental performance at the organizational level (e.g., Henriques & Sadorsky, 1996; Laplante &

Rilstone, 1996; Zhang et al., 2008). Future research could expand on this and assess the effect of external

pressures on individuals’behavior. Additionally, researchers should investigate the predictive role of team level

188 J. L. ROBERTSON AND J. BARLING

DOI: 10.1002/job

variables, pro-environmental beliefs, and personality variables (e.g., conscientiousness), as these variables might

add to our understanding of factors that inﬂuence workplace pro-environmental behaviors.

Fifth, future research should examine the effects of leadership in conjunction with other organizationally relevant

variables in promoting workplace pro-environmental behaviors. For example, a body of literature is beginning to

examine the role of human resource management practices in the greening of organizations (Jackson, Renwick, Jabbour,

& Muller-Camen, 2011; Jackson & Seo, 2010). Future research should expand on this literature by investigating the

additive effects of environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership, leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors,

and human resource management practices on employees’workplace pro-environmental behaviors.

Sixth, future research should investigate alternative models that examine the inﬂuence of different leadership

styles on employees’harmonious environmental passion and their workplace pro-environmental behaviors. For

example, given that negative aspects of leadership, such as laissez faire behaviors, have been shown to have negative

effects (e.g., on safety; Kelloway et al., 2006), future research might examine the potential negative relationship

between laissez faire leadership and employees’harmonious environmental passion and their workplace

pro-environmental behaviors. Further, data from this study provide evidence that environmentally-speciﬁc

transformational leadership indirectly inﬂuences employees’workplace pro-environmental behaviors through their

harmonious environmental passion. Going forward, future research should advance and test an alternative model

that investigates the inﬂuence of general transformational leadership. Extending this, future research should examine

the difference between environmentally-speciﬁc and general transformational leadership, and determine whether one

type of leadership style evokes higher levels of workplace pro-environmental behaviors.

Like all research, several aspects of this study warrant some caution and suggest additional avenues for future

research. First, the cross-sectional nature of this study precludes any causal inferences. To allow for causal inference,

future research should go beyond the constraints of the cross-sectional data used in the current study and include

longitudinal or time series data. Conducting longitudinal studies in the future will also allow researchers to consider

the possibility of reverse causal ordering. Speciﬁcally, a reverse causal model, in which employees’harmonious

environmental passion and workplace pro-environmental behaviors inﬂuence their leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc

transformational leadership and/or their leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors, should be examined.

Finding support for such a model would imply that employees play an active role in the leader–subordinate relationship,

whereby subordinates inﬂuence their leaders, rather than the passive role that is traditionally assumed.

Second, we collected data across a variety of organizations, leaving it impossible to isolate any cross-level

effects on employees’or leaders’behaviors. Third, we created a number of scales for the purposes of this study,

as no existing scales measuring the relevant variables were available. Although we tested a measurement model to

assess the scales we created, the measurement model by itself provides only limited evidence for the measures’

validity (e.g., we do not assess the measures’content, divergent, convergent, or criterion-related validity). Future

research should focus on developing stronger measures by providing further evidence for the measures’content

and construct validity. Fourth, the measurement model that we used to assess the validity of the scales developed

speciﬁcally for this study was based on subordinates only. Future research should replicate the measurement

model with data obtained from leader and subordinate dyads to reduce the possibility of rival hypotheses that

the measurement model is sample dependent.

Fifth, consistent with previous research on workplace pro-environmental behaviors that invariably describes and

measures these behaviors in different ways (Russell & Grifﬁths, 2008), our study replied upon a newly developed

measure of workplace pro-environmental behaviors that was not fully validated. In order to advance green OB

research, development of a consensually agreed upon deﬁnition and a psychometrically validated questionnaire of

workplace pro-environmental behaviors should now be a priority.

Sixth, in the proposed model, we did not obtain data for subordinates’ratings of their leaders’workplace

pro-environmental behaviors. It is possible that subordinates will not see all of the workplace pro-environmental

behaviors their leaders enact, especially those that are engaged in private. Thus, the effect of role modeling may be

underestimated in this study. Future research might proﬁtably focus on subordinates’reports of their leaders’

workplace pro-environmental behaviors to get a more accurate index of the effects of role modeling.

GREEN LEADERSHIP AND EMPLOYEES’BEHAVIORS 189

DOI: 10.1002/job

Despite these limitations, there are several strengths to this study. First, to confront possible threats from

mono-method bias (Podsakoff et al., 2003), we obtained data for one predictor variable from two separate

sources (leaders and subordinates). However, future research might beneﬁt from including multi-level data for

all predictor variables from various subordinates. Second, the results point to the possible beneﬁts of investigating

the effects of target-speciﬁc transformational leadership on behaviors other than safety.

Implications

Support for the proposed model highlights two ways in which leaders might inﬂuence organizational greening

activity. First, as hypothesized, environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership was associated with subordinates’

harmonious passion for the environment, and indirectly associated with subordinates’workplace pro-environmental

behaviors. Given that transformational leadership (e.g., Barling, Weber, & Kelloway, 1996; Dvir, Eden, Avolio, &

Shamir, 2002) and safety-speciﬁc transformational leadership (e.g., Mullen & Kelloway, 2009) can be explicitly

trained, leadership development initiatives might beneﬁcially emphasize how leadership can be expressed to

inﬂuence the greening of organizations. Second, leaders’workplace pro-environmental behaviors predicted employees’

harmonious passion for the environment and workplace pro-environmental behaviors directly. Organizations might

beneﬁt from creating climates (e.g., organizational pro-environmental climate; Russell & Grifﬁths, 2008) that encourage

and reward leaders (and employees) for enacting environmentally friendly behaviors.

In conclusion, this is the ﬁrst study to develop and test a model linking environmentally-speciﬁc transformational

leadership and subordinates’workplace pro-environmental behavior. The results identiﬁed the role of environmental

descriptive norms in inﬂuencing leaders’environmentally-speciﬁc transformational leadership and their own

workplace pro-environmental behaviors, and, in turn, leaders’role in understanding employees’harmonious passion

for the environment and their workplace environmentally friendly behaviors. Kermit the Frog once said, “It’s not

easy being green.”However, if the current ﬁndings are replicated across different samples with longitudinal data,

organizational greening activity will be seen to be much easier than what Kermit feared; and signiﬁcant implications

concerning green leadership, workplace pro-environmental behaviors, and organizations’response to environmental

sustainability issues will have been gained.

Acknowledgements

Financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and constructive feedback

from Amy Bergenwall, Alyson Byrne, Erica Carleton, Amy Christie, Angela Dionisi, Kathryne Dupre, Colette Hoption,

Kevin Kelloway, and Nick Turner are gratefully acknowledged.

Author biographies

Jennifer Robertson is a doctoral candidate in organizational behavior at Queen’s School of Business, Kingston,

Ontario. Her research focuses on psychological issues involved in environmental sustainability within organizations.

Jennifer’s research interests also include the nature and prediction of leadership.

Julian Barling holds a Queen’s Research Chair at Queen’s School of Business, Canada. His current research inter-

ests lie primarily in the area of leadership, including the nature and development of leadership, and leaders’mental

health and illness; and in counterproductive behaviors in organizations.

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Appendix A

Descriptive Norms Scale.

Please answer the following questions:

1. Do you know any family members and/or friends who work for an environmental organization (e.g. renewable

energy organization, environmental consultants, the ministry of the environment, non-governmental environmental

organization, etc.)?

2. Do your family members and/or friends practice environmentally friendly behaviors that you know about or have

seen?

GREEN LEADERSHIP AND EMPLOYEES’BEHAVIORS 193

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3. Do your family members and/or friends endorse environmentally friendly programs?

4. Do your co-workers practice environmentally friendly behaviors that you know about or have seen?

5. Do your co-workers endorse environmentally friendly programs?

Environmental Passion Scale

1. I am passionate about the environment.

2. I enjoy practicing environmentally friendly behaviors.

3. I enjoy engaging in environmentally friendly behaviors.

4. I take pride in helping the environment.

5. I enthusiastically discuss environmental issues with others.

6. I get pleasure from taking care of the environment.

7. I passionately encourage others to be more environmentally responsible.

8. I am a volunteered member of an environmental group.

9. I have voluntarily donated time or money to help the environment in some way.

10. I feel strongly about my environmental values.

Workplace Environmental-friendly Behavior Items

1. I print double sided whenever possible.

2. I put compostable items in the compost bin.

3. I put recyclable material (e.g. cans, paper, bottles, batteries) in the recycling bins.

4. I bring reusable eating utensils to work (e.g. travel coffee mug, water bottle, reusable containers, reusable cutlery).

5. I turn lights off when not in use.

6. I take part in environmentally friendly programs (e.g. bike/walk to work day, bring your own local lunch day).

7. I make suggestions about environmentally friendly practices to managers and/or environmental committees, in an

effort to increase my organization’s environmental performance.

194 J. L. ROBERTSON AND J. BARLING

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Organizational role stress All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. The study of role stress perhaps really began before or during the time of Shakespeare when Shakespeare's Jacques so poignantly noted, prior to Orlando's entrance onto the stage with Adam, that we are all mere actors playing multiple roles on the stages of life. On our various stages, we take upon ourselves different roles to play, and it is the expectations of others around us (e.g., supervisors and coworkers) rather than those of a playwright and audience that guide our behaviors on the stage set of the workplace. Even Shakespeare's Macbeth states that “life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.” Here, Macbeth is ...

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