Corporate environmental ethics and employee's green creativity? The perspective of environmental commitment

Abstract

Many companies have become aware of the importance of green creativity for sustainable development in the face of an increasingly critical global environmental situation. As employee's green creativity serves as an important foundation for corporate green creativity, we divide green creativity at the employee level into green incremental and radical creativity and construct a theoretical framework to assess the effects of corporate environmental ethics on these two types of green creativity. We distribute 195 valid leader-employee matching questionnaires to a variety of companies in China. We find that corporate environmental ethics has a positive effect on both incremental and radical green creativity. Furthermore, we discover that employee environmental commitment partially mediates the association between corporate environmental ethics and the two types of green creativity identified above. Sustainable human resources management (HRM) plays a moderating role between corporate environmental ethics and environmental commitment and moderates the indirect effects of corporate environmental ethics on the two types of green creativity through the promotion of environmental commitment. These findings suggest that companies should improve their corporate environmental ethics and sustainable HRM to encourage employees to enhance their own environmental commitment and, in turn, increase their green incremental and radical creativity levels. Our study has significant implications for enhancing business innovation and achieving sustainable development. Finally, we also address the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

Exploring How and When Environmental Corporate Social Responsibility Impacts Employees’ Green Innovative Work Behavior: The Mediating Role of Creative Self-Efficacy and Environmental Commitment

“…Similarly, environmental commitment, as an affective state, in comparison to other environmentally-related affective constructs such as environmental passion and environmental empathy [22,39], exhibits greater stability and sustainability and can better predict work outcomes in the environmental aspects [26,39]. For example, Song et al (2023) [40] and Zhu et al (2022) [19] independently identify environmental commitment as a direct predictor of employees' green creativity and GIWB at the individual level. Meanwhile, Chang and Chen (2013) [41] recognize environmental commitment as a mediator between green organizational identity and corporate green innovation performance at the organizational level.…”

Green intellectual capital and employee environmental citizenship behavior: the mediating role of organizational agility and green creativity

“…GIC can potentially have a significant and far-reaching effect on the organizational environment; it fosters employee green creativity (EGC) which results in sustainable and ecofriendly products (Song et al, 2023). GIC not only promotes employee creativity (Hameed et al, 2021) but also catalyzes various other factors influencing EGC, such as human resource management, work engagement, and knowledge (Ahmad et al, 2021;Hameed et al, 2021;Riva et al, 2021).…”

“…GIC can potentially have a significant and far-reaching effect on the organizational environment; it fosters employee green creativity (EGC) which results in sustainable and eco-friendly products (Song et al. , 2023).…”

Foreign Ownership, Board of Directors, and Environmental Commitment in European International New Ventures

“…Notwithstanding, there remains a gap in our understanding of how corporate governance (CG) impacts on these firms' commitment to environmental issues (CEI) and environmental ethos. Recent studies in this field such as Albitar, Al-Shaer, and Liu (2023), Góes et al (2023), and Song et al (2023) have scarcely isolated INVs as a unique unit of analysis, nor have they exclusively examined the impact of foreign ownership and board of directors on the environmental commitment-export intensity nexus.…”