Greening the Workplace Through Practices and Behavioral Intervention
This chapter reviews the current state of knowledge on the choices made by and within organizations to encourage, support, and help staff to incorporate environmental considerations into their daily work routines. The chapter sets out to examine our under
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Greening the Workplace Through Practices and Behavioral Intervention
Abstract This chapter reviews the current state of knowledge on the choices made by and within organizations to encourage, support, and help staff to incorporate environmental considerations into their daily work routines. The chapter sets out to examine our understanding of the measures implemented to reduce the environmental footprint of organizations. It also assesses the effectiveness of such measures from the perspective of environmental performance indicators. Keywords Environmental performance · Individual latitude · Practices
9.1 Greening the Workplace: From Decisions to Performance 9.1.1
The Limits of Individual Action
In a work context, a person’s contribution to environmental performance can be expressed in the form of a wide range of pro-environmental behaviors. Of course, a person’s contribution depends on a range of characteristics associated with the type of job performed. Driving a bus, serving a customer, carrying out research to prepare a class, managing a customer account, providing care, delivering an order, and working as an operator on an assembly line are all examples of activities associated © The Author(s) 2020 P. Paillé, Greening the Workplace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58388-0_9
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with very different jobs. However, what these activities have in common is that they are all structured around a set of tasks that invariably have an impact on the natural environment. Whether it is more or less direct, more or less intense, or more or less conscious, the environmental impact is very real. In other words, in work settings, zero impact is a chimera, an unachievable goal, simply because it is unrealistic. It is unrealistic because of a whole range of contingency factors that significantly influence the choices made by employees and, consequently, restrict their ability to act. The first factor is the level of decision latitude. The list of environmental behaviors discussed in this book suggests that, in theory at least, there are many options available to an individual to act in an environmentally friendly way in the workplace. This is only partly true. In Chapter 6, I discussed the close similarity between the pro-environmental behaviors observed in and outside the workplace. I also argued that individuals may act differently toward the environment depending on the context in which they find themselves. Depending on an individual’s characteristics, a context will tend to limit or constrain environmental engagement to a greater or lesser extent. Thus, in a private (personal) context, an individual’s ability to act relative to the range of possibilities available to them will be potentially greater than in an organizational context. For example, in a private context, a person is free to adopt a course of action or behavior that might involve purchasing eco-responsible products. In fact, an individual’s scope for action is best examined by taking into account the role performed by that individual in
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