Helping Employees Help the Environment: An Intervention to Increase Environmental Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCB-E) Via a Subtle Stimulus

<p>Researchers’ understanding of the relationships between environmentally-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors (i.e., OCB-Es) and other workplace variables have improved since the turn of the century, but both our comprehension of the behaviors and the effectiveness of interventions targeting them require much more investigation. Further, there is very little research that examines the role of positive affect in promoting these behaviors, even though scholars have suggested that it may be the “silver bullet” (Kals & Müller, 2012) to facilitating employees’ voluntary environmental actions. To that end, the aim of the current research is to take an initial step towards understanding how organizations can use a subtle affective stimulus intervention to increase employees’ OCB-Es, as well as how stable personality traits may moderate this relationship. The current experimental field-study was designed to increase OCBEs via repeated exposure to a positively valenced subtle stimulus (i.e., a picture of a person smiling). In addition to examining positive affect as a mediator of this relationship, I also investigated how certain personality traits (i.e., openness to experience and conscientiousness) may both moderate the relationship between positive affect and OCB-Es and directly affect them.</p> <p>Although neither the proposed relationship between the subtle stimulus and positive affect nor the indirect effect of the stimulus on OCB-Es via positive affect for two of the three performance dimensions were supported, results did demonstrate a mediation effect of the III smiling picture on eco-initiative OCB-Es via positive affect. Additionally, the path analytic results found a direct relationship between openness to experience and eco-civic engagement OCB-Es, and a moderation effect of openness on the relationship to positive affect and ecoinitiative OCB-Es. Unfortunately, the direct and moderation effects for conscientiousness and OCB-Es failed to demonstrate significance. Theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and future directions based on these findings are discussed.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Year dc:date.available

2020

Author dc:creator

• Garden, Rebecca C.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Xiaoxiao Hu
• Violet Xu
• Andrew Bennett

• Conscientiousness
• Environmental Organizational Citizenship Behavior
• Openness to experience
• Performance
• Positive affect
• Subtle affective stimulus
• Industrial and Organizational Psychology
• Organizational Behavior and Theory
• Personality and Social Contexts

Statement dc:rights

• <p>In Copyright. URI: <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).</p>

Identifier

9798607346201

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.odu.edu:psychology_etds-1350