The relative importance of employee green behavior for overall job performance ratings: A policy‐capturing study

Abstract

Organizational researchers and practitioners are increasingly interested in the topic of employee pro-environmental or 'green' behavior. In this study, we examine the relative importance of employee green behavior to overall job performance ratings compared with task performance, organizational citizenship behavior and counterproductive work behavior. We used an experimental policy-capturing design, which involves participants rating the job performance of several hypothetical employees who vary in their work behaviors. Thirty-eight managers from the Netherlands each rated 36 scenarios describing employee behaviors (1368 ratings in total). Results showed that employees' task performance contributed most to overall job performance ratings, followed by counterproductive work behavior, organizational citizenship behavior and employee green behavior. More broadly, findings suggest that employee green behavior makes an independent positive contribution to overall job performance ratings, but its influence is weaker than that of other forms of work behavior. Implications for future research and green human resource management are discussed. KEYWORDS employee green behavior, job performance, policy-capturing design 1 | INTRODUCTION Performance appraisal entails the process in which an employee's individual work performance is evaluated over a certain period of time (DeNisi & Smith, 2014). The goal of this study is to examine whether and how employee green behavior (EGB) predicts overall job performance ratings above and beyond more established forms of employee behavior. EGB refers to 'scalable actions and behaviors that employees engage in that are linked with and contribute to or detract from environmental sustainability' (Ones & Dilchert, 2012a, p. 452).Examples of EGB include recycling paper, printing double sided, saving electricity and avoiding waste. Established forms of employee behavior include task performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and counterproductive work behavior (CWB). According to Rotundo and Sackett (2002), task performance describes 'behaviors that contribute to the production of a good or the provision of a service' (p. 67), OCB describes 'behavior that contributes to the goals of the organization by contributing to its social and psychological environment' (pp. 68-69) and CWB describes 'voluntary behavior that harms the well-being of the organization' (p. 69). Thus, task performance and OCB represent positive employee contributions, whereas CWB is an undesirable form of employee behavior.With the current study, we constructively replicate research by Rotundo and Sackett (2002), who investigated whether employees' task performance, OCB and CWB contribute to overall ratings of job performance by supervisors. They found that task performance had a moderate and positive effect, followed by a moderate and negative effect of CWB and a weaker positive effect of OCB on overall job performance ratings. These findings suggest that task performance, OCB and CWB influence overall job perform...

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