Institutional structure of organization and employees’ pro-environmental behaviors: the mediating effect of employees’ organizational identification

Purpose The purpose of this study is to enrich the literature on employee relations with a new model focusing on the effect of institutional structure and that of employees’ organizational identification on the relationship between institutional structure in an organization and employees’ pro-environmental behaviors, which represents an alternative approach for understanding employees’ pro-environmental performance. Design/methodology/approach We collect multi-level and multi-source data from 52 four- or five-star hotels in China ( N  = 963). For data analysis, we adopt the approach of multilevel structural equation modeling. Findings The results suggest that organizations’ green institutional structure (G-structure) can significantly influence employees’ organizational identification, which in turn can increase their pro-environmental performance. Originality/value We propose a new multi-level theoretical perspective to explain employees’ pro-environmental behaviors. While prior studies on the issue mainly consider only the effects of such micro-level variables as ability, motivation and personality, we focus on the effect of organizational institution and its interaction with micro-level variables so that we can evaluate the effect a commonly-studied contextual variable, i.e. green institutions, on the behaviors. Moreover, in this new theoretical model, we also take into account the effect of another insufficiently-tested micro-level variable, i.e. employees’ identification, which has not been considered as frequently as other micro-level variables in studying employees’ pro-environmental performance. Our results highlight the importance of all these variables and suggest a valuable alternative model for more comprehensive research of employees’ green performance.